(Not) Caring to Know: Vice Epistemology meets Situated Affectivity

Encountering the world is not a dispassionate affair. Our emotions shape and condition how we gain knowledge and understanding of ourselves and the world around us. Our doubts can be laden with fear, our beliefs motivated by anger, our understanding may be tempered with love — more generally, our intellectual activities are molded by our embodied affective states. The virtuous person’s epistemic practices are characterized by the proper manifestation of these states in conjunction with her virtues. However, what role do these states play in the lives of epistemically vicious agents? What role do fear, and anger, but possibly also hope and joy, play in the denial of evidence about climate change? How does hatred for marginalized social groups impact the prejudiced person’s testimonial practices and communicative exchanges, both offline and online? How can shame and envy enable and sustain echo-chambers and online bubbles? Is there any value (epistemic or otherwise) in being indifferent and apathetic rather than ignorant about personal, political, economic and ecological crises? Or are indifference and apathy hindrances to epistemic care? How might epistemic care, participatory sense-making, and relational virtues, once properly cultivated, serve to improve the lives of such inquirers, especially when embedded in vicious epistemic cultures? Why should one be emotionally responsible? How might the cultivation of virtues be conducive to improving our political conditions and fighting epistemic vices? What structural and cultural changes are needed to make these interventions effective?

To address these questions, the present conference fosters a dialogue between scholars from a range of fields like virtue and vice epistemology, social epistemology, feminist and standpoint epistemology, situated affectivity, affect studies, 4E cognition, political philosophy of mind, phenomenology of emotions, environmental ethics, science communication, and more.

This three-day (hybrid) conference will be hosted by the Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value at the University of Pardubice, from September 3rd -5th, 2025

This event has been supported by the Czech Science Foundation, as part of grant no. 24-11282S “Vicious Epistemic Cultures”