Institutskolloquium

16.04.2025

Joseph Bjelde
(HU Berlin)

 What the Wise Grasp

Abstract: TBA

On Collateral Damage, Epistemic Cleansing and Reparative Dialogues

Abstract:
This talk will build on a paper co-authored with scholar of transitional justice Selbi Durdiyeva, forthcoming in American Communist History. In the paper, we explore the legacy of Angela Davis and its intersections with the liberation movements in Europe’s East, Baltic, Caucasus, Central and North Asia. Our analysis is anchored in a close reading of Jiří Pelikán’s open letter appealing to Davis for solidarity with Czechoslovak political prisoners, following the repression of Prague Spring and the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia. While Davis has never publicly responded to the letter, throughout her life she has continuously disputed the oppressive character of state organized socialism and the USSR. Building on critical leftist, de- and anticolonial scholarship from societies directly affected by Russian-Soviet imperialism and colonialism, we explore the selective anti-imperialism of Davis and much of the Western Left. In Davis’ speeches, we identify the construction of Soviet Utopia through the epistemic expropriation and re-appropriation of socio-historical and lived experiences of affected societies via what we conceptualize as the epistemic cleansing of dissenting perspectives and embodied knowledges. We observe that this dynamic involves patterns of instrumentalization, inter-imperiality, extractivism, empire and genocide denial, and the reinforcing of Russian colonial narratives, consequently rendering many populations as collateral damage to Western-centric political goals. We call for epistemic reparations and further remedies through the recognition of the partiality and variation of human experience and knowledge of oppression. We believe that these are necessary steps towards mutual learning and dialogues, that will foster a genuinely and consistently anti-oppressive leftist politics, refusing to sacrifice any population to exceptionalism on the path to liberation and freedom.

Abstract: 
At Timaeus 51d3–e6, Plato claims that only if there is a real difference between knowledge (epistêmê or nous) and true opinion (doxa) is there an ontological difference between Forms and sensible particulars; and that epistêmê differs from true doxa in that only epistêmê comes about through teaching (as opposed to persuasion), is accompanied by a true account (logos), and is impervious to persuasion. The central question of my talk is where Plato gets this distinction between epistêmê and true doxa from and how this epistemic distinction subsequently leads to an ontological distinction between Forms and sensible particulars. I shall argue that the key intuitions underlying Plato’s distinction between epistêmê and true doxa can be traced back to the way in which knowledge claims appear in common usage, and that this common usage can be found in passages in which Socrates explains the difference between epistêmê and true doxa by way of examples which are meant to be intuitive and pre-theoretical. The conception ofepistêmê emerging from these introductory examples is that of a kind of cognition which is characteristically stable. While these examples already explain much of what is said in the Timaeus, they also differ from it in two ways: first, they do not associate epistêmê with a true account; second, they take the stability of epistêmê to be due to epistêmê’s being anchored in perception and thus do not involve Forms. True accounts become relevant only in more specific contexts in which epistêmê is conceived of as a capacity for stable judgements concerning general objects: in such contexts the judgements of epistêmê are anchored in a true account of the general object. These are precisely the contexts where the Forms become relevant, for Plato argues (most famously in Politeia V) that the anchoring cognition of a general object cannot be obtained on the basis of perception alone.

Bahadir Eker
(Universität Hamburg)

Fiction and Accidental Truth

Abstract: 
Some philosophers think that works of fiction are those that are produced by a special type of ‘fictive utterance’ performed by their authors, ones that involve the intention that the audience responds in a particular, imaginative way to the work. A simple version of this idea faces the challenge that some uncontroversially fictional works seem to consist in a mixture of fictive and non-fictive utterances. But even the weaker thesis that being exclusively produced by fictive utterances is sufficient for fictionality seemed problematic: cases in which the content of the work reproduces the content of another non-fictional representation have been considered as counterexamples to it. An additional condition requiring that the content of the work be either false or merely accidentally true has been thought to solve this problem. I argue in response that accidentalness of the truth of the work-content is irrelevant for the question of fictionality.

.Reference with and without Intention

Abstract: TBA

Locke’s Legacy: Reid and Shepherd on Intuitive, Demonstrative, and Probable Knowledge

Abstract: TBA

Aristotle on Philosophizing with Puzzles

Abstract: TBA