 Take, for example, Du Bois’s rich 1899 [1986a] text “The Conservation of Races” where he elaborates an account of African Americans as a distinct historical people. Du Bois’s account was reduced in a number of contemporary critical essays to the question of whether he meant “black” to refer to biology, in which biological concepts themselves were understood as free of culture. But from phenomenology’s point of view, the philosophical conceptualization of nature, and the current political uses made of naturalist claims, are themselves cultural artifacts, historically and culturally contingent. Thus, when we read the history of modern European philosophy, we need to be alive to the ways in which “nature” is being socially constructed and conscripted for philosophical projects.