Miranda Fricker

Professor of Philosophy
Birkbeck College, University of London

“Epistemic Justice: Prejudice in the Economy of Credibility”

Tuesday, April 3, 2007
4:00 p.m.
Edmund J. Cain Hall (EJCH) 108H
University of Nevada, Reno

Professor Fricker’s forthcoming book, Epistemic Injustice, explores how relations of social power and identity impinge in our epistemic practices to produce distinctively epistemic forms of injustice—injustices in which someone is undermined specifically in their capacity as a knower. Her Leonard Lecture will present the primary form of epistemic injustice—‘testimonial injustice.’ This form incurs when the level of credibility a speaker receives from a hearer is deflated by prejudice on the hearer’s part. The lecture will explore the nature of the wrong involved in such injustices; and characterize the virtue required on the part of hearers to counteract the ever-present risk of perpetrating them. This virtue—the virtue of testimonial justice—turns out to be a genuine hybrid: at once an intellectual and an ethical virtue.

Miranda Fricker is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London. She did her D.Phil in Philosophy at the University of Oxford (1996). Her published work includes papers in ethics, epistemology, and feminist philosophy; she co-edited The Cambridge Companion to Feminism in Philosophy with Jennifer Hornsby (2000); and is co-writing Reading Ethics with Sam Guttenplan (forthcoming, Blackwell). Her book, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, comes out in June with Oxford University Press.

 
Sponsored by
The Philosophy Department, UNR, 784-6846
and
The Leonard Endowment
http://www.unr.edu/philosophy
 

Lecture Flyer in pdf (Acrobat Reader) format