What are we doing when we blame and forgive? What is ‘epistemic injustice’ and how does it affect these practices? How is it being used in processes of truth and reconciliation in South America and in supporting women survivors to come forward and tell their stories? How can the techniques of fiction deepen our insights into philosophical questions? How does unequal access to conceptual language enable some people to tell their stories, while others suffer without knowing how to put names to their experiences? Miranda Fricker, a professor of philosophy at New York University, will discuss these questions with novelist Amanda Dennis. Fricker coined the term ‘epistemic injustice’ in her 2007 book Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing.
This event is produced in collaboration with the American University of Paris.
About the speakers:
Miranda Fricker is Julius Silver Professor of Philosophy at NYU, and Co-Director of the New York Institute for Philosophy. She is the author of Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, and her recent research is mainly in moral philosophy. She is a Fellow of the British Academy, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her forthcoming book, Blaming and Forgiving: The Work of Morality, explores the interpersonal moral psychological responses of blaming, apologizing, and forgiving.
Amanda Dennis is the author of the novel Her Here, and a book about Samuel Beckett and French philosophy: Beckett and Embodiment: Body, Space, Agency. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, and Guernica. She teaches creative writing and comparative literature at the American University of Paris.
