Epistemic Virtues and Vices in a Non-Ideal World

Over the past decade, epistemology has witnessed an increasingly ‘non-ideal’ turn in the way it approaches our epistemic dependence, agency, and practices. This has been partly prompted by the rise of phenomena such as misinformation, “fake-news”, echo chambers, and doubt-mongering. One way of addressing these issues has been to reflect on the role that epistemic virtues and vices play in navigating our social, online, and intellectual conduct. In light of this, the conference aims to develop themes in ‘non-ideal’ epistemology by connecting them to virtue and vice epistemology.

How we theorise about the virtues and vices of the mind connects to a range of themes in ‘non-ideal’ theory, and this conference is open to all of them. We are interested, for instance, in how lessons from feminist epistemology and philosophy of race can shape our thinking about intellectual character. We are also interested in applied virtue and vice epistemology: cases studies of epistemic virtues and vices under conditions of oppression, and how assumptions about the social status of epistemic agents may show up in our vice-epistemological theorising. More generally, we welcome papers that theorise the epistemic virtues and vices using the resources of feminist philosophy, philosophy of race, methodology in epistemology, and ‘non-ideal’ social and political philosophies.

Submission should be no longer than 350 words.

The deadline for abstracts is 20th March and we will respond with acceptance/rejections by 1st April. The conference is kindly funded by the Mind Association and the Department of Philosophy, University of Nottingham. We hope to be able to offer bursarial support for unfunded and underfunded attendees, as well as those with childcare needs. The conference is also BPA, SWIP, and GPS compliant.

Those interested should include a cover sheet detailing the applicant’s name, institutional affiliation, and the title of the talk/paper. Please send submissions (or any queries) to [email protected]