EVENT CANCELLED: Who's afraid of the post-truth condition?

Join the Centre for Research in Economic Sociology and Innovation and Department of Sociology for an insightful open seminar with Professor Steve Fuller.

Professor Steve Fuller is Auguste Comte Professor of Social Epistemology in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick. Originally trained in history, philosophy and sociology of science, Fuller is best known for his foundational work in the field of ‘social epistemology’, which is the name of a quarterly journal that he founded in 1987 as well as the first of his twenty-five books.

From 2011 to 2014 he published a trilogy relating to the idea of a ‘post-’ or ‘trans-‘ human future, all with Palgrave Macmillan under the rubric of Humanity 2.0. His most recent books are Post-Truth: Knowledge as a Power Game (Anthem 2018) and Nietzschean Meditations: Untimely Thoughts at the Dawn of the Transhuman Era (Schwabe 2019). He is completing a follow-up book on post-truth, to be published by Anthem.

Perhaps the most interesting feature of the post-truth condition is the extent to which it has taken academics and other political and economic elites by surprise. Nevertheless, it should have been expected, given higher levels of educational attainment and greater access to information, which together have empowered a democratic sensibility that increasingly refuses to defer to expert authority. I shall consider the implications of this development for how we understand reasoning, evidence and knowledge work more generally.

Chair: Christopher Cunningham (PhD student)

This seminar is part of an open seminar series, hosted by the Centre for Research in Economic Sociology and Innovation and Department of Sociology.