Overview

Huaping Lu-Adler will deliver the inaugural Shanghai Lecture in Philosophy, “Kant on Public Reason and the Linguistic Other”, on Friday 10 May 2024, followed by commentaries from Damian Melamedoff-Vosters and Yuan Yuan.

Bio

Huaping Lu-Adler is a professor of philosophy at Georgetown University. She was born and raised in China. After receiving an MA in philosophy from Peking University, she continued to study philosophy in the US. She received her PhD (2012) under the direction of the late Kant scholar Henry Allison. She was Vice President of the North American Kant Society from July 2020 to June 2023 and now serves as a “diversity and inclusion” advisor to its current leadership. She is the author of two monographs, Kant and the Science of Logic (Oxford University Press, 2018) and Kant, Race, and Racism: Views from Somewhere (Oxford University Press, 2023). She has also published articles on various aspects of the history of Western philosophy, from epistemology and philosophy of language to metaphysics and philosophy of science. In her next book, she will critically reexamine Kant’s political philosophy by placing it in its original historical context, which was characterized by colonialism, racial slavery, Western-centric cosmopolitanism, and intra-European contestations for global domination.

Abstract

On Kant’s account, “public use of reason” is the use that a truth-seeking scholar makes of his reason when he communicates his thoughts in writing to a world of readers. Commentators tend to treat this account as expressing an egalitarian ideal, without taking seriously the limiting conditions—especially the scholarship condition—built into it. In this paper, I interrogate Kant’s original account of public reason in connection with his construction of the “Oriental” as a linguistically and therefore epistemically and culturally inferior Other. I thereby give reasons to worry that Kant’s account is substantively inegalitarian (even if it is nominally egalitarian). I also draw attention to the fact that Kant constructed a linguistic Other against the backdrop of colonialism and from a position of power. This positionality gave what he said about the Other an ideology-forming and world-making effect. In this way, his exclusionary discursive practices—such as depicting the Oriental as an inferior linguistic Other—could have a lasting impact on knowledge production and on the real-world exercise of public reason.

Register

The inaugural Shanghai Lecture in Philosophy will take place on Friday 10 May 2024 at 3-5pm in the N107 Auditorium at NYU Shanghai. Click here to register to attend, or scan the barcode in the poster below. If you are not able to attend, the lecture will later be made available here.