Includes bibliographical references and index.

Descartes's silences on slavery and race / Timothy J. Reiss -- Race in Hobbes / Barbara Hall -- Metaphysics at the barricades : Spinoza and race / Debra Nails -- Imagining an inundation of Australians, or, Leibniz on the principles of grace and race / Peter Fenves -- The contradictions of racism : Locke, slavery, and the two treatises / Robert Bernasconi and Anika Maaza Mann -- Berkeley and the westward course of empire : on racism and ethnocentrism / William Uzgalis -- "A lousy empirical scientist" : rethinking Hume's racism / Andrew Valls -- Rousseau, natural man, and race / Bernard Boxill -- Kant's Untermenschen / Charles Mills -- Race and law in Hegel's philosophy of religion / Michael Hoffheimer -- John Stuart Mill and "the negro question" : race, colonialism, and the ladder of civilization / Anthony Bogues -- Marx, race, and the political problem of identity / Richard Peterson -- Nietzsche's racial profiling / James Winchester.