The Philosophers' Cocoon

I mentioned here in a post I made last year that there is a new journal on its way called Critical Philosophy of Race. Well, it's here.

As I said in the post last year, this is a great sign of the vibrancy of philosophy of race as a subfield and I expect that the journal will very soon gain the kind of prominence that Hypatia, as a somewhat analogous journal, has.

I'm happy to have been able to contribute a book review to this inaugural issue. The book I review, Should Race Matter? Unusual Answers to the Usual Questions, is by a prominent applied ethicist David Boonin, and so I take the task of reviewing the book as an opportunity to consider the potential strengths and potential weaknesses of using applied ethics as a way to approach the issue of race philosophically. I find that this is a wonderful thing about book reviews… they allow you to sit back and look not just at the individual piece of work under review, but also at the larger discipline and its development and how the work under review exemplifies promise or problems in said development.