CFP: The Cologne Knowledge Router

The Cologne Knowledge Router: Call for Commentators

The Cologne Center for Contemporary Epistemology and the Kantian Tradition (CONCEPT) organizes a monthly online talk series: The Cologne Knowledge Router. For each of the installments of The Router, CONCEPT invites established philosophers to present their work on a topic within the scope of traditional, social, and formal epistemology. By including early career scholars as commentators, The Router supports a horizontal knowledge transfer on all levels of experience. The main aim of each meeting is an interactive discussion on the presented topic.

Description:

The eighthinstallment of The  Cologne Knowledge Router will take place on February 11 at 4 p.m. CET, and it will be held via Zoom.

Exactly as any of the other installments, it will consist of a talk by the keynote speaker and a commentary by one or two early career respondents. The keynote speaker will have around 30 minutes to present their paper. Each respondent will then have about 10 minutes to comment on the speaker’s paper. The Q&A will be a further 30 minutes.

We are excited to announce that our keynote speaker will be Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa (University of British Columbia). He will present his paper entitled ‘Skepticism, Caution, and Conservativism’. A short description of it is below:

Caution, prudence, and doubt are conceptually connected in the public imagination. I'll draw out some of those connections, with an aim toward challening them. They are, I’ll argue, connected in deep and important ways to skeptical traditions in epistemology.
Epistemology courses often begin with skepticism. Skepticism is engaging, and in the right mood, it can feel pressing, even urgent. Moreover, thinking about skepticism can feel very intellectual. You don’t have to get very far in your study of epistemology to start to be worried that some of your beliefs might have been hastily formed — that we might not have the strong reasons we sometimes assume we do, to justify many of our most basic assumptions. The skeptical project characteristic of Descartes’s Meditations is intuitively gripping, and recognizable as common sense.
This talk will articulate and challenge the orthodox assumption that skepticism and suspension of belief is intimately tied up with caution or carefulness. I’ll argue that, given plausible connections between epistemology and action, this thought is tied up in important ways with conservative assumptions about the status quo — if things are basically fine as they are, then the salient risk an agent faces is the risk of messing things up. If so, being slower to believe, and so slower to act, will mitigate this risk. This association between natural epistemic ideas and political ideas actually constitutes a conservative ideology. This reasoning relies implicitly on the false assumption that there is risk associated with mistakenly leaving things as they are. This is an instance of what Hundleby (2016) calls the “status quo fallacy.” This may help explain Charles Mills’s Mills (1994, p. 230) suggestion that in some contexts, a focus on skepticism can seem like a “perk of social privilege”.

Submissions:

The commentators will be selected on the basis of a call for expressions of interest. We thus invite submissions of letters of a maximum length of 500 words showing interest in commenting on the speaker’s paper. Along with their letters, applicants may also submit their Curricula Vitae. Submissions from academics from underrepresented groups in philosophy are especially encouraged. 

The submission deadline is January 31, 2021.

All submissions and related inquiries should be sent to: [email protected].

Expect notifications about the outcome by February 1, 2021.