The taxonomy of “race” and the anthropology of sex : conceptual determination and social presumption in Kant

This chapter argues that the different treatment of the concepts or ‘race’ and ‘sex’ in Kant’s philosophy shows how the first was a philosophical problem that required justification while the latter was – and usually still is – taken for granted. It shows how, through his writings on race, Kant defended an historical conception of the natural genus. Refusing the natural distinction between ‘genus’ and ‘species’, Kant’s philosophical determination of the concept of ‘race’ then attempts to introduce, below these, a new terminal category in zoological taxonomy that justified, for him, the positing of significant classificatory differences between the human ‘races’ even if they all belonged to the same natural genus/species. In contrast, the concept of sex or gender (Geschlecht) is never subject to any philosophical determination but treated as an unquestioned basis for the justification of social and political differences between men and women