10 April 2025, Spinoza lectures, Jennifer Lackey

Since 1995, the Philosophy Department of the University of Amsterdam has annually appointed a foreign philosopher to the Spinoza chair. As part of the appointment, the Spinoza professor gives a number of lectures intended for a broad audience that wants to stay informed about contemporary developments in philosophy. This is the first of two lectures by the current Spinoza Chair holder, Jennifer Lackey, the Wayne and Elizabeth Jones Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University.

Epistemic Reparations and the Right to Be Known

This lecture provides the first discussion in the literature of the epistemic significance of the phenomenon of “being known” and the relationship it has to reparations that are distinctively epistemic. Drawing on a framework provided by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, it is argued that victims of gross violations and injustices not only have the right to know what happened, as the UN maintains, but they also have a right that is altogether absent from these discussions—the right to be known. The case is then made for expanding the standard conception of reparations beyond the legal/political, psychological, and moral to include those that are distinctively epistemic, as we are members of an epistemic community in addition to a legal/political and moral community; we are not just agents in a political and moral sense, but also an epistemic one; we have epistemic duties distinct from our legal and moral obligations; and we can be wronged not only legally/politically, psychologically, and morally, but also epistemically. An account is then provided of epistemic reparations as intentionally reparative actions, which take the form of epistemic goods given to those who have been epistemically wronged by parties who acknowledge these wrongs and whose reparative actions are intended to redress them. This account captures both the right to know and the right to be known possessed by survivors of gross violations and injustices.

Programme

18.00 hrs | Open to public
18.30 hrs | Welcome/opening words
18.45 hrs | Start of lecture followed by discussion with audience
20.00 hrs | Reception
21.15 hrs | End

The lecture is free, but we kindly ask you to register via the form here.