SOURCE: A review of Keeping Faith, in The Philosophical Review, Vol. 104, No. 4, October, 1995, pp. 601-3.

In the following review, Gooding-Williams offers a tempered evaluation of Keeping Faith.

This volume brings together a wide-ranging collection of seventeen essays, most of which were published elsewhere during the last ten or so years and some of which appear here in revised versions. Its subtitle is somewhat misleading, because Keeping Faith is neither a sustained philosophical discussion of American racial identities nor an extended argument to the effect that some noteworthy assumptions about race have helped to shape the history of American philosophical thought.¹ Still, many of the book’s chapters explicitly engage the theme of race (see especially the chapters in part 1, “Cultural Criticism and Race,” and part 4, “Explaining Race”), while others touch on traditional and familiar philosophical problems (for example, the nature of morality and the justification of knowledge).

A...