Knowing Agency from the Margins

Type: 
Lecture
Audience: 
Open to the Public
Building: 
Zrinyi u. 14
Room: 
412
Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - 5:30pm
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Date: 
Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - 5:30pm to 7:00pm

 

Abstract

Political concerns about who knows, and the ways in which values infuse authoritative and trustworthy knowledge, have been central to feminist epistemology but continue to be neglected within traditional analytic epistemology, despite a recent contextual turn within the field.  The most developed epistemic view focused on the situatedness of knowers and their differential positioning with respect to knowledge, evidence, justification, and truth—standpoint epistemology—has focused, however on a limited range of standpoint agents.  In this paper, I aim to advance understanding of knowing agency from the margins by attending to features of standpoint agents more apparent in racism, heterosexism, and ableism than in the more widely discussed cases of sexism and classism.  Given that interest and disinterest in the politics of knowledge correlates with differential power within the discipline or philosophy, the politics of philosophical knowledge is a secondary topic of the paper.