The annual KTS Center lecture is delivered each year by a distinguished academic who has made significant contributions to philosophical debates of concern to the KTS Center.
2022-2023
'Knowledge and Disinformation'
Mona Simon
Abstract:
This paper develops a full account of the nature of disinformation as ignorance-generating content. The view, if correct, carries high stakes upshots, both theoretically and practically. First, it challenges several widely spread theoretical assumptions about disinformation – such as that it is a species of information, a species of misinformation, essentially false or misleading, essentially intended/aimed/having the function of generating false beliefs in/misleading hearers. Secondly, it shows that the challenges faced by disinformation tracking in practice go well beyond mere fact checking.
Mona Simion is professor of philosophy and Director of the COGITO Epistemology Research Center at the University Glasgow. She is the author of two monographs: Shifty Speech and Independent Thought (Oxford University Press, 2021), and Sharing Knowledge (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
2020-21
'”Forgive me!” Why You Can’t Always Get What You Deserve'
Miranda Fricker
ABSTRACT: There are many different kinds of reasons to forgive—that the wrongdoer has apologized, that not forgiving is destroying a valued friendship, that you don’t even want to be this angry person any more …-- and yet no matter how many such reasons may accumulate in a given case, and no matter how much the wrongdoer may deserve to be forgiven, still these reasons can never generate a rights-claim on their part that you forgive them. Why not? I compare the case of gratitude, and ultimately offer an explanation in terms of the pragmatic self-refutation involved in the very idea of being forgiven under requirement.
Miranda Fricker is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her publications include The Epistemic Life of Groups: Essays in the Epistemology of Collectives (coeditor, 2016); Applied Epistemology, special issue of the Journal of Applied Philosophy (coeditor, 2016), Reading Ethics, (coauthor and editor, 2009), Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (2007), and the Cambridge Companion to Feminism in Philosophy, (coeditor, 2000). She was awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2014-16); and is currently finishing work on a book in moral philosophy, Blaming and Forgiving: The Work of Morality (forthcoming OUP).