The Essex Lectures in Philosophy: Professor Amia Srinivasan Lecture 2

The Essex Lectures in Philosophy are held each year. In June 2024 the lectures are titled 'The Contingent World: Genealogy, Epistemology, Politics.'

The Contingent World: Genealogy, Epistemology, Politics

A 'critical genealogy' is an account of the origins of something of contemporary significance – a widespread belief, institution, practice, value, concept – put forward with the purpose of unseating or discrediting that thing. These lectures will think about critical genealogy in some of its historical, epistemological and political dimensions. What social, intellectual and political conditions make a particular historical moment generative of critical genealogical thinking? Can critical genealogies wield not just psychic but moreover epistemic power, rationally requiring us to abandon beliefs, concepts or other forms of consciousness? What non-epistemic forms of power can critical genealogy exercise, how can such power be wielded as a tool of social critique, and with what normative authority?

Amia Srinivasan is the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls College, Oxford. She completed her BPhil and DPhil in Philosophy at Oxford, and did a BA at Yale. She works on topics in political philosophy, epistemology, the history and theory of feminism, and metaphilosophy.

Her first book, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-first Century, was published in 2021. It was an instant Sunday Times bestseller, winner of the Blackwell’s Book of the Year, and has been shortlisted for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Orwell Prize. She is currently working on a second book, on the practice of critical genealogy, entitled The Contingent World: Genealogy, Epistemology, Politics. 

Each lecture is one hour, followed by a 45-minute Q&A session.

To register for the event please contact phaispg@essex.ac.uk