Robert Bernasconi

Professional Bio

Areas of Specialization

• Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Continental Philosophy
• Critical Philosophy of Race
• Social and Political Philosophy
• Modern Philosophy
• History of Ethics

Recent Courses

• Medieval Ethics
• Critical Philosophy of Race
• Sartre and Fanon
• Levinas
• Modern Political Philosophy and Slavery

Recent Publications

• How to Read Sartre, New York, Norton, 2007.
• “Kant’s Third Thoughts on Race” in Reading Kant’s Geography, eds. Stuart Elden and Eduardo Mendieta, Albany: SUNY Press, 2011, pp. 291-318.
• “Critical Philosophy of Race” in Routledge Companion to Phenomenology, eds. Sebastian Luft and Søren Overgaard, New York: Routledge, 2011, pp. 551-562.
• “Proto-Racism: Carolina in Locke’s Mind” in Racism and Modernity, eds. Iris Wigger and Sabine Ritter, Berlin: LIT, 2011, pp. 68-82.
• "Crossed Lines in the Racialization Process; Race as a Border Concept"Research in Phenomenology, 42, 2012, pp. 206-228.
• “Hegel’s Faith and Knowledge and the Metaphysics That Takes the Place of Metaphysis,” in Hegel and Metaphysics, Allegra de Laurentiis, Berlin, Walter de Gruyter, 2016, pp. 135–48.
• “Nietzsche as a Philosopher of Racialized Breeding,” in The Oxford Handbook on Philosophy of Race, ed. Naomi Zack, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. 54–64.
• “Making Nietzsche’s Thought Groan: The History of Racism and Foucault’s Genealogy of Nietzschean Genealogy in ‘Society Must Be Defended,’” Research in Phenomenology, vol. 47, no. 2, 2017, pp. 153–74.
• “Critical Philosophy of Race and Philosophical Historiography,” in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Race, ed. Paul C. Taylor, Linda Martin Alcoff, and Luvell Anderson, New York, Routledge, 2017, pp. 3–13.
• “Making Nietzsche’s Thought Groan: The History of Racism and Foucault’s Genealogy of Nietzschean Genealogy in ‘Society Must Be Defended,’” Research in Phenomenology, vol. 47, no. 2, 2017, pp. 153–74.
•  “Being Is Evil: Boehme’s Strife and Schelling’s Rage in Heidegger’s ‘Letter on ‘Humanism,’” in Gatherings: The Heidegger Circle Annual, vol. 7, 2017, pp. 164–81.
•  “Ottobah Cugoano’s Place in the History of Political Philosophy: Slavery and the Philosophical Canon,” in Debating African Philosophy: Perspectives on Identity, Decolonial Ethics and Comparative Philosophy, ed. George Hull, Routledge, New York, 2019, pp. 25–42. 
•  “A Most Dangerous Error: The Boasian Myth of a Knock-Down Argument against Racism,” Angelaki, vol. 24, 2, 2019, pp. 92-103.
•  “The Other Does Not Respond: Levinas’s Response to Blanchot,” Angelaki, vol. 24,3, June 2019.
•  “‘Subjectivity Must Be Defended’: Substitution, Entanglement, and the Prehistory of the Me in Levinas,” in The Oxford Handbook of Levinas, ed. Michael Morgan, Oxford University Press, 2019, pp. 259-278.

   

Current Projects

"I try to write an essay in each of my areas of specialization every year so as to maintain my expertise. My long term project is to write a monograph on the failure of most seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophers to engage with the evils of the slave trade. I am the editor of three journals: Critical Philosophy of Race, Levinas Studies, and Ecoethica."