Paul C. Taylor - Department of Philosophy, University of California, Los Angeles

This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, graduate students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.

Today’s conversation is with Paul C. Taylor, who teaches in the Department of Philosophy at University of California, Los Angeles. In addition to a number of scholarly essays and edited collections on philosophy and the question of race, he is the author of Race: A Philosophical Introduction (2003), On Obama (2015), and Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics (2016). He is currently at work on two book-length projects: Dark Futures and Uneasy Sanctuary: Rethinking Race-Thinking.In this conversation, we discuss the place of philosophical thinking in the study of Black life, critical theory as a form of Black study, and the intersection of aesthetic questions and critical theories of race in the field of Black Studies.