Digging Deeper Into the Text

The following post constitutes an edited transposition of a series of comments found in another thread on this site. In the event that I have uncharitably edited this material from its origin, I depend upon my peers to alert me to the fact. You can find the original post here. While the title of this post refers to two individuals (for purely archival purposes…and I think it’s a clever title), it is not my desire to exclude others from the discourse; in fact, I hope that those who are interested in this topic will get involved in this conversation.
Context: Some commentators and analysts argue that undergraduates emerge from the contemporary American system with weak critical engagement skills. Specifically, some students express difficulty in determining the cohesive meaning of the sum of their intellectual exploits. In other words, some students become frustrated when they are unable to find (satisfactory) connections between different and seemingly disparate courses, ideas, and arguments.  Does this difficulty result from weak critical methodology? Should educators be more explicit or direct in their efforts to get students to hone their critical skills? If so, how could educators go about doing this?

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CFP: Dialectics and Distances between Self and Other

From USF:

The University of South Florida Philosophy Graduate Student Organization is pleased to announce:

The Fourth Annual USF Graduate Philosophy Conference “Ipseity & Alterity: Dialectics and Distances between Self and Other”

March 4th & 5th, 2011

Deadline for Submission: December 31st, 2010

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Thomas Flynn (Emory University): “Sartre and Merleau-Ponty on the Dialectic”

We are also pleased to announce a faculty address by Dr. Charles Guignon (University of South Florida)

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Miranda Fricker on Epistemic Injustice

An interview at Philosophy Bites:

Testimonial injustice occurs when others fail to treat you seriously as a source of knowledge. In this interview Miranda Fricker, author of a recent book on the topic, explains this concept which lies at the intersection between epistemology and political philosophy.

This interview is from 2007, but I just found out about it via Feminist Philosophers. And here’s a review of her book, Epistemic Injustice:

Epistemology and Ethics have traditionally been kept apart. This book brings them together. Miranda Fricker focuses on two kinds of epistemic injustice: the injustice that occurs when someone is not treated seriously as a possible source of knowledge (testimonial injustice) and the injustice that occurs when a society lacks a conceptual framework for understanding the experiences of someone who has been treated badly (hermeneutic injustice). An example of the first kind is when someone stopped by the police is not believed because he is black; an example of the second type is when someone is a victim of sexual harrassment in a society that still lacks that concept. Both are kinds of epistemic injustice in Fricker’s terms. That is they are harms that an individual suffers that relate to that individual’s potential to give knowledge and to be a subject of social understanding.

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Santiago Zabala Interview

Here’s a nice interview with Santiago Zabala on his new book The Heremenutic Nature of Analytic Philosophy: A Study of Ernst Tugendhat.

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