About

Robert Bernasconi is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy and African American Studies at Penn State University. He joined Penn State in 2008, coming from the University of Memphis, and has previously taught at the University of Essex in England. His academic work focuses on nineteenth and twentieth century European philosophy, with a particular emphasis on critical philosophy of race. Bernasconi has written extensively on topics related to African American and African Diaspora history and culture, and has contributed essays on figures such as Ottobah Cugoano, Frederick Douglass, Antenor Firmin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, and Frantz Fanon. His scholarship includes exploring the ways in which the philosophical canon has marginalized non-Western philosophy and exposing the racism embedded in the works of philosophers like John Locke, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Arendt. He is the editor or co-editor of approximately thirty books on race and is the founding editor and current editor of the journal Critical Philosophy of Race.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Gender studies
• History
• Epistemology
• Philosophy
• Mathematics
• Aesthetics

Selected publications

• Slow Steps, Compromises, and Blind Spots in the Development of Ashley Montagu's Antiracism

  2026-03-23

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  Ashley Montagu is well-known as one of the most prominent antiracists of the last half of the twentieth century, but today most of the scholarly focus on him concentrates on his involvement in the UNESCO Statement on Race of 1950 with its examination of the difference between the popular understanding of race and the scientific concept of it. It emerges that Montagu was already then aware of the limits of this approach as a way of addressing racism. That his reservations subsequently grew can be demonstrated by comparing the six different editions of his popular study, Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, first published in 1942. In the book's final edition in 1997, he came close to acknowledging that he should have spent more time trying to understand the racism that exists independently of scientific racism, but even then he was ill-equipped to address systemic racism.

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• Philosophical Histories as Sites of Racism

  2025-07-17

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  Abstract Historians of racism have tended to focus on natural history and have often anachronistically confined themselves to the concept of race developed within the Boasian school of anthropology, where race is divorced from culture. But the justifications of slavery, colonialism, and even genocide that were developed in the nineteenth century tended to be more reliant on philosophical or conjectural history than natural history. It was in terms of culture and civilization, as much as heredity, that these practices were justified. Indeed, if one looks at far-right groups today, they seem to be more reliant on philosophies of history than biology. The authors addressed in this chapter include Voltaire, Kames, Ferguson, Kant, Herder, Hegel, Gobineau, Spengler, and Yockey.

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• Nietzsche como filósofo do cultivo seletivo racializado

  Estudos de Nietzsche · 2025-03-19

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  Os nazistas ofereceram uma leitura distorcida de Nietzsche ao assimilar suas ideias raciais às suas próprias, mas a leitura dominante de Nietzsche hoje é igualmente falsa na medida em que minimiza o aspecto racial de sua filosofia. A tendência de seus apologistas tem sido focar em seu anti-antisemitismo, mas os principais problemas surgem de seu endosso à escravidão racializada e, especialmente, ao cultivo seletivo racializado ou eugenia. As ideias de Nietzsche sobre raça não eram especialmente originais, ao contrário do que dizem alguns comentadores; elas estavam muito enraizadas e eram informadas pelos teóricos raciais de sua época. Pelo menos um desses teóricos, Otto Ammon, o elogia explicitamente por ter reconhecido a importância da raça para a cultura. Quando Nietzsche advoga o cultivo seletivo de uma raça mais forte, ele não tem em mente um programa circunscrito ao cultivo ou à educação, mas a defesa de uma forma de seleção artificial.

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• Hegel and Egypt's African Element

  Hegel Bulletin · 2024-02-05 · 2 citations

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  Abstract Contrary to the widespread view that Hegel excluded Africa from what he called world history proper, the specifically African element of Egypt was indispensable to his account of the pivotal dialectical moment that saw spirit's release from its immersion in nature. Hegel's racist caricature of Africans in the early part of the lectures was not gratuitous, something that commentators can leave to one side. It was integral to his dialectical account of world history because it served to generate the contradiction that saw the Persian Empire give way to Greece. This understanding is confirmed by the newly completed four-volume edition of Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of World History in the Gesammelte Werke . These new volumes also enable us to gain critical insight into how the editors of the first two published versions of the lectures, Eduard Gans and Karl Hegel, sought in their different ways to shape the reception of Hegel's lectures.

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• Slavery's absence from histories of moral and political philosophy

  The Southern Journal of Philosophy · 2024-07-26 · 1 citations

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  Abstract At a time when many institutions of higher learning are reflecting on their past complicity with chattel slavery, either in terms of the sources of their funding or their use of slave labor, philosophy as an academic discipline has been largely silent about its own complicity. Questions surrounding the legitimacy and practice of slavery were a regular part of moral philosophy courses at universities from the sixteenth century until its abolition. However, the discussions of slavery found in the dominant textbooks tended to be deeply conservative judged even by the standards of those times. This partly explains why after emancipation the many moral questions posed by slavery are barely mentioned in survey histories of ethics or of political philosophy today: this is a context in which academic philosophy does not show itself to its best advantage. The present article explores what academic philosophers need to do to redress the discipline's past failures, including its virtual silence about slavery since the Civil War. Given today's political environment, academic philosophers need to reflect on how the discipline in its institutional form functions within a system governed by the legacy of slavery and its aftermath.

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• Transculturation and the porosity of cultures: Fernando Ortiz

  Diogenes · 2024-02-28 · 2 citations

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  Abstract Fernando Ortiz introduced his account of transculturation to replace Melville Herskovits’s notion of acculturation as a way of describing the historical contact between cultures. Ortiz understood the idea of acculturation to be promoting a kind of assimilationist model very different from what he witnessed in his native Cuba. Transculturation conforms neither to the model of cosmopolitanism promoted by Kant’s universal history, nor to the kind of multiculturalism that is rooted in Herder’s rival approach to history. Instead, it presents a concept of cultural contact and cultural transformation that highlights the way the material and economic conditions of social existence shape the institutions in which cultures more narrowly conceived are embedded and relate to each other. By bringing transculturation into dialogue with the idea of the porosity of cultures initially promoted in 1925 by Walter Benjamin in his essay on Naples, we find a way to free transculturation from Ortiz’s tendency to lapse into biological metaphors with the danger of retaining a reference to cultural purity that he would not endorse. Transculturation, thus revised, recommends itself as a term helpful for thinking about a world shaped by mass migration and the new technological forms of ever more rapid cultural exchange. Properly understood, it promotes a future where openness and sharing are valued over ownership and preservation.

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• Literary Attestation in Philosophy: Heidegger's Footnote on Tolstoy's ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’

  2024-03-06

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  Tolstoy’s name appears only once in Heidegger’s published writings. He is named in a footnote to the discussion of Being-towards-death to be found in the first chapter of the second division of Being and Time. The footnote reads, ‘L.N. Tolstoi hat in seiner Erzahlung “Der Tod des Iwan Iljitsch” das Phanomen der Erschiitterung and des Zusammenbruchs dieses “man stirbt” dargestellt.’ Macquarrie and Robinson provide the following translation: ‘In his story “The Death of Ivan Ilyitch” Leo Tolstoi has presented the phenomenon of the disruption and breakdown of having “someone die”’ (SZ, p. 254). The footnote seems straightforward enough. It would appear to invite a reading of Tolstoy’s story which would serve to illustrate Heidegger’s account of the phenomenon of everyday Being-towardsdeath.

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• Preface

  Eco-ethica · 2023-01-01

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• The Demise of Moral Philosophy Both Before and After the American Civil War

  Eco-ethica · 2023-01-01

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  During the first half of the nineteenth century, moral philosophy enjoyed enormous prestige in colleges throughout the United States: through its alliance with moral theology, it sought to forge the conscience of the nation. It lost this status in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. One of the reasons for this was the growing secularization of society, but one should not underestimate the impact of its failure to serve as the conscience of the nation on the issue of slavery. From being a practical discourse aimed at creating good citizens, moral philosophy retreated into a highly theoretical endeavor divorced from society. Returning to practical affairs is not the answer for moral philosophy unless it is accompanied by a new form of writing its history, one that takes a broader view of its context, including understanding the institutional pressures that impact philosophy when it is done in academic settings.

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• Existentialism against Colonialism

  Critical Philosophy of Race · 2022-11-17

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  Abstract Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth both sought to offer accounts of colonialism as a form of systemic racism. They did so starting from lived experience, but they understood that accounts of lived experience remain fundamentally unintelligible when abstracted from the material system in which that experience is located. This is true even for those who share that experience. Lived experience becomes concrete only in the light of the material system that produces it, while the material system remains opaque without the illumination brought to it by concrete lived experience. They shared the conviction, first, that only dialectics can bring these two together and, second, that the colonial system is only fully revealed in revolutionary praxis.

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Frequent coauthors

• Simon Critchley

  12 shared

• Jacob Dahl Rendtorff

  4 shared

• Jason Aleksander

  San Jose State University

  4 shared

• Kristi Sweet

  DePaul University

  4 shared

• Adriel Trott

  University of Scranton

  4 shared

• Andrew LaZella

  4 shared

• Hans‐Georg Gadamer

  ECW Press (Canada)

  4 shared

• Richard Lee

  4 shared