'Europe, for Example'

Abstract

This paper aims to show why a philosophically informed approach to the question of Europe interrupts at least one doxa that underlies the orthodox thought of Europe as the site of a moribund worldview; namely, the construal of Europe as dominated by a political culture that is fundamentally compromised by an egregious and often implicit ‘racial theory’, ‘raciology’, or by an underlying ‘racial metaphysics’. The paper shows why this kind of matter-of-course understanding is inadequate, and points the way towards a more rounded and judicious conception of Europe’s entanglement with racism.