Bapsybanoo Marchioness of Winchester Lecture 2017
Speaker: Professor Sandra Harding (Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, UCLA)
Title: ‘After Mr. Nowhere: New Proper Philosophic Selfs?’
Venue: Examination Schools
Webpage: Winchester Lectures
Abstract: Contemporary analytic philosophy has modelled itself on distinctive characteristics of modern Western sciences: in its initial formulations, it was to be a "scientific philosophy." Its objectivity, and thus its intellectual and social value, was defined in terms of its freedom from social and political values. Yet the new social movements emerging since the 1960s, such as poor peoples' movements, civil rights, feminist, anti-colonial, and many more, have developed methods of research, including in philosophy, that claim a stronger commitment to objectivity than the conventionally objective sciences and their philosophies ever could achieve, though they refuse the value-free understanding of how best to maximize objectivity. This presentation will identify and reflect on the different conceptions of the "proper philosophic self" created by the knowledge-production projects of these new social movements.
