Descartes And Mills's Non Cartesian Sum By Charles Mills

Section B- Question 3 The essay “Non Cartesian Sums” by Charles Mills accounts for the sub person, which is the African American, in philosophy. There is a significantly small number of African American philosophers and Mills does not attribute it to racism, instead he suggests “that a major contributory cause is the self-sustaining dynamic of the ‘whiteness’ of philosophy, not the uncontroversial whiteness of skin of most of its practitioners but what could be called, more contestably, the conceptual or theoretical whiteness of the discipline” (Mills 2). This is discouraging to any African American who would possible pursue their interest in philosophy. Black people are not even mentioned in philosophical text. There is an understanding in the African American community that certain philosophical beliefs and claims such as that of the …show more content…
So if philosophy will apply to the African American, one must eliminate the influence of history. The topic of the sub person arose when racism, violence, and political history became an issue. The difference between Descartes and Mills is that ones’ external world is based upon the privilege that they possess. For the sub person such as the African American, this external world is difficult to change and it is harsh. In the Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, the sub person is invisible because “whites do not see hum, they take no notice of him, not because of physiological deficiency but because of philosophical “construction of their inner eyes,” which conceptually erases his existence” (Mills 9). Unlike Descartes, Ellison is not trying to establish clear and distinct ideas. Instead he is attempting to convince other people that the African American exists as a person. Mills goes further to make a powerful statement calming that “African American philosophy is thus inherently, defintionally oppositional, the philosophy produced by property that does not remain silent but insists on speaking and