Philosophy of Struggle

Leonard Harris is Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University, USA. He is a specialist in the work of Alain LeRoy Locke and a founding member of Philosophy Born of Struggle (PBOS).Lee A. McBride III is Associate Professor of Philosophy at The College of Wooster, USA.

• AcknowledgementsSource AcknowledgementsEditor’s IntroductionPart I Prolegomenon1) What, then, is ‘Philosophy Born of Struggle’?Philosophia nata ex conatuPart II Immiseration and Racism (Oppression as Necro-being)2) The Concept of Racism: An Essentially Contested Concept? (1998)3) What, Then, Is Racism? (1999)4) Necro-Being: An Actuarial Account of Racism (2018)Part III Honor and Dignity (Reason and Efficacious Agency)5) Autonomy Under Duress (1992)6) Honor: Emasculation and Empowerment (1992)7) Tolerance, Reconciliation and Groups (2003)8) Dignity and Subjection (2018)Part IV An Ethics of Insurrection; Or, Leaving the Asylum (Virtues of Tenacity)9) Honor and Insurrection or A Short Story about why John Brown (with David Walker’s Spirit) was Right and Frederick Douglass (with Benjamin Banneker’s Spirit) was Wrong (1999)10) Insurrectionist Ethics: Advocacy, Moral Psychology, and Pragmatism (2002)11) Can a Pragmatist Recite A Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note? Or Insurrectionist Challenges to Pragmatism—Walker, Child, and Locke (2018)Part V Bridges to Future Traditions12) Universal Human Liberation: Community and Multiculturalism (1998)13) Community: What Type of Entity and What Type of Moral Commitment? (2001)14) Tradition and Modernity: Panopticons and Barricados15) The Horror of Tradition or How to Burn Babylon and Build Benin While Reading A Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1997)16) Telos and Tradition: Making the Future—Bridges to Future Traditions (2014)

This book includes the main texts that have marked out Leonard Harris' continuing combat against all that separate humans from other humans, the human from her humanity. And as we feel the wind blowing through the pages of this Reader, we are reminded that the demand for radical questioning and examination which defines philosophy is first and foremost a force of emancipation.