Upcoming Events on Fall 2025:
CANCELED:
Rima Basu (Claremont McKenna College)
"Ignorance as Epistemic Etiquette " Sept 19, C-HIPP 791, 3:30 PMTo call someone ignorant is to insult them. It is not surprising then that much of the philosophical literature on ignorance has focused on its harms. In this paper, I argue that there are morally laudable cases of ignorance qua ignorance. Ignorance, as a kind of epistemic etiquette, protects inquiry from turning into an inquisition, questioning from turning into prying. When we indulge in overcuriosity we risk a range of inquisitive wrongs, we risk failing to give others the respect they are owed not just in how we act towards them, but also in how they figure in our inquiries. Two complications arise, however, in determining how to understand ignorance as epistemic etiquette. First, many examples of hermeneutical injustice rely on the disadvantaged not questioning the status quo, of not being curious. Second, to determine whether one should be ignorant about p may require inquiring into p in the first place. Despite these challenges, I posit epistemic etiquette as a promising resource for distinguishing one class of morally permissible ignorance.
Robert P. George and Cornel West
"A Public Conversation" Sept 12, tbd, 6:30 PMJohn Witte (Emory)
"Constitution Day Lecture" Sept 17, tbd, 6PMJohn Witte (Emory)
"Lunchtime Lecture" Sept 18, tbd, tbdMatthew Smith (Northeastern University)
Liberatory Systems, Not Structural Domination
Friday, October 3, 2025
3:30 PM • Close-Hipp 791
University of South Carolina
Reception to follow
Abstract
Many critics have argued that popular theories of republican freedom are insensitive to structural forms of oppression. In particular, theories of republican freedom, which define unfreedom as domination, place dominating agents at the core of their accounts of unfreedom. But well-known accounts of structural oppression leave specific agents out of the analysis. If these widely accepted accounts of structural oppression are true, then republican unfreedom due to structural domination is not possible. Many contemporary republicans thus accept that structural oppression exist have, in response to this tension, developed novel conceptions of republican structural domination. In this talk, Professor Smith traces these developments and raises objections to conceiving of structural oppression as republican structuralist domination. He then argues that we need a more complicated vocabulary of freedom and unfreedom centered on the material systems that realize human agency.
Presented by the Department of Philosophy, University of South Carolina.