Phila M. MsimangStellenbosch University | SUN · Department of Philosophy
Phila M. Msimang
Doctor of Philosophy
Assessing the uses and abuses of race & ethnicity in science & society.
About
30
Publications
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Introduction
How does racism affect people's life chances? What is the relationship between population descriptors and the populations that they are meant to represent? How does an individual relate to the group(s) that they supposedly belong, and vice versa? Can racial and ethnic classifications have ameliorative, pragmatic, and scientific functions? These are the kinds of questions that I am predominantly concerned with.
Additional affiliations
July 2016 - December 2017
June 2017 - December 2017
Education
January 2021 - September 2024
July 2015 - March 2018
Publications
Publications (30)
This essay explores the relationship between the social sciences and biology with respect to race. I begin by giving an overview of the disparate origins of racial classification and the population history of South Africa, noting the peculiarity of their roots. I move from there to sketch how knowledge from the social sciences can improve the quali...
Racial classifications are thought to be useful in biomedical settings because they can suggest medically relevant genetic ancestry and medically relevant social or environmental variables. This is the use of race as a proxy in biomedical settings. In this chapter, I argue that the pragmatic use of racial classifications in these settings can be no...
Historically, the South African Institute of Race Relations (IRR) has been viewed as a reliable source of information given its near century-long work of compiling statistics and reports about race relations and the social conditions affecting different race groups in South Africa. I make the case that the IRR should not be considered a reliable so...
Recent research shows that the inappropriate use of race and ethnicity in healthcare leads to poor patient outcomes. Contemporaneous work shows that accounting for inequalities caused by discrimination often requires the use of race and ethnicity as variables that are mediated in their effects by discrimination along those dimensions of identity an...
Race talk is talk about groups whose nature is presently under debate. This thesis deals with the question of whether the concept of race can account for the nature of the groups race talk is about. I argue that these groups are properly accounted for and understood as social races (rather than biological races or racialized groups) through specify...
Some alethic pluralists maintain that there are two kinds of truths operant in our alethic discourse: a realist kind and an anti-realist kind. In this paper, we argue that such a binary conception cannot accommodate certain social truths, specifically truths about race. Most alethic pluralists surprisingly overlook the status of racial truths. Doug...
Ovett Nwosimiri argues in a paper he published in 2021 that affirmative action and preferential hiring policies are no longer appropriate for South Africa because of the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. The case he makes is that since COVID-19 has impacted people of all races, there should no longer be any consideration of race in hiring p...
The philosophy of race is a growing academic discipline with an ever-expanding literature. The metaphysics of race as a subdiscipline of the philosophy of race asks: are there such things as races and, if races do exist, what kind of things are they? Although the metaphysical status of race remains unresolved, the debate about whether races are rea...
Race Otherwise is a contemporary exploration of race and identity in South Africa that attempts to provide us with a new form of humanism that may help us overcome or at least challenge and disrupt racialisation. This book is located in a local non-racialist tradition in which race is to be overcome or transcended through creative ways of reimagini...
Since the publication of the now infamous paper 'Age-and education-related effects on cognitive functioning in Colored South African women' by Nieuwoudt and colleagues where they claim the cognitive functioning of coloured women is defective in some ways, there has been renewed doubts about the legitimacy of race in research... The attention which...
Lee McIntyre’s Respecting Truth chronicles the contemporary challenges regarding the relationship amongst evidence, belief formation and ideology. The discussion in his book focusses on the ‘politicisation of knowledge’ and the purportedly growing public (and sometimes academic) tendency to choose to believe what is determined by prior ideological...
I presented this seminar in 2019 and 2020 for the School for International Training (SIT) as part of the Cape Town and Stellenbosch leg of their Study Abroad programme. My seminar was a part of their “South Africa: Multiculturalism and Human Rights” module where students are exposed to problems and perspectives about the contemporary state of South...
Lee McIntyre’s Respecting Truth chronicles contemporary challenges regarding the relationship between evidence, belief formation, and ideology. Discussion in his book focuses on the ‘politicization of knowledge’ and the purportedly growing public (and sometimes academic) tendency to choose to believe what is determined by prior ideological commitme...
Adam Hochman has recently argued for comprehensive anti-realism about race against social kind theories of race. He points out that sceptics, often taken as archetypical anti-realists, may admit race in certain circumstances even if they are eliminativists about race. To be comprehensively anti-realist about races, which also means rejecting all ‘r...
Adam Hochman has recently argued for comprehensive anti-realism about race against social kind theories of race. He points out that sceptics, often taken as archetypical anti-realists, may admit race in certain circumstances even if they are eliminativists about race. To be comprehensively anti-realist about races, which also means rejecting all ‘r...
There is a consensus amongst many South African scholars, activists, human rights advocates, and citizens that South Africa should become a non-racial society. So strong is our collective belief in a non-racial society in the future of South Africa that we have this principle inscribed in the founding provisions of our Constitution. As an ideal, it...
Biological racial realists face a range of problems. These problems depend on whether they claim races are natural objective classificatory groups (i.e., that races are monistic) or that races are pragmatic or investigation dependent classifications (i.e., that races are pluralistic). Realists who say races are objective face selection problems in...
Biological racial realism is a metaphysical position where race is seen to be real on the grounds of biological principles that imply that there are natural classificatory categories within the human species. These classificatory categories are meant to be indicative of there being different kinds of people within the human species, these kinds bei...
Abstract The received view on racial thinking is that it uniquely emerged in the modern West. I formulate an argument against this position using recent work in classical studies and present an argument from evolutionary psychology that disputes the received view. I follow other thinkers (e.g., Lape 2010; Mallon 2013) in proposing that racial think...
Hempel's Dilemma is a challenge that has to be met by any formulation of physicalism that specifies the physical by reference to a particular physical theory. It poses the problem that if one's specification of the physical is current physical theory, then the physicalism which depends on it is false because current physics is false; and if the spe...
Vít Gvoždiak published a reconciliatory analysis of Searle’s social ontology with semiotics in Gvoždiak (2012). Without prior knowledge of his paper, I wrote an analysis of the same subject (Msimang 2014). Even though Searle’s social ontology is a common point of reference in the formulation of semiotics in these papers, it also serves as a point o...
The received view on racial thinking is that it uniquely emerged in the modern West. In this essay, I formulate an argument against this position using recent work in classical studies and evolutionary psychology. I follow other thinkers (e.g., Mallon 2013; Lape 2010) in proposing that racial thinking is a generalized explanation over groups of peo...
Hempel’s Dilemma is a problem that has to be met by any physicalist theory whose specification of the physical is physics. It poses the problem that if one’s specification of the physical is ‘current’ (present day) physical theory, then the physicalism which depends on it is false because current physics is false; and if the specification of the ph...
Searle’s social ontology concerns the question of how it is that we are to reconcile different aspects of reality but takes for granted a particular kind of naturalism based on his unexplicated “basic facts” of nature. The consequence of this approach is that Searle’s ontology deals specifically with social reality and its institutions, and never di...
Questions
Questions (2)
I have recently been reading up on hypotheses about differences in human intelligence. Not only are there biological hypotheses about differences in intelligence between various population groups across the world but there are also biological hypotheses about differences between the sexes (e.g.: debates about if differences in intelligence between the sexes really do exist and what the causes of these purported differences may be). I am interested in what motivates these hypotheses. One possible motivation could be that these hypotheses are well-supported by evidence. Asking myself "What is this evidence, if there is any?" has led me to the main question I am posting here: is there evidence of sexual dimorphism in some of our relatives or other animals which would suggest to us that this may be the case in humans as well? What evidence do we have that there is sexual dimorphism in human intelligence?
Palaeoanthropology and palaeobiology in human evolutionary biology have well-substantiated divisions of the genus Homo and are relatively clear about the line within the genus leading down to modern humans. Are there any similar taxonomic divisions in present human populations? So far, I have found that the answer to this question is no. I would like to give a detailed account of why this is or is not the case.
What are the current positions in the literature on the matter from a systematics/taxonomic point of view?
Thank you in advance for your time,
Phila.
