Spinoza Lectures 2023: Decolonizing Epistemology

This year, the Spinoza Chair will be held by Linda Martín Alcoff, Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York. The central topic is the impact op colonialism on current day epistemology. Alcoff will deliver two lectures.

The modern era of epistemology, from Descartes forward, emerged simultaneously with European colonial expansion. As we know from the sociological studies of science, knowledge projects have specific local genealogies and orientations, and the knowledge projects concerning knowledge itself have been no different. How has modern epistemology been impacted by colonialism, and how might we turn course?

About Linda Martín Alcoff

Linda Martín Alcoff is Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York. She earned her PhD at Brown University after doing undergraduate work at Florida State University and Georgia State University.

Her books include Rape and Resistance: Understanding the Complexities of Sexual Violation; The Future of Whiteness; Visible Identities: Race, Gender and the Self, which won the Frantz Fanon Award; and Real Knowing: New Versions of the Coherence Theory. She has published 12 edited books and over 100 articles. Her writings have appeared in the New York Times, Aeon, the NY Indypendent, among others. For over a decade she has taught courses on decolonial philosophy and epistemology in Spain, Australia and South Africa. She was elected President of the American Philosophical Association in 2012, and in 2021 she was named by Academic-Influence.com as one of the ten most influential philosophers today. She is originally from Panama.

Lecture 1: Extractivism as a model for Modern Epistemology

Extractivist epistemologies work analogously to extractivist capitalism: seeking an epistemic resource of some sort---such as a piece of pharmacological knowledge held by an indigenous community or rural healer concerning the medicinal potential of a given plant, or an artifact from an indigenous funeral site. The extractivist epistemic approach treats this epistemic resource as separable from its origin, and then renders it into a knowledge commodity with exchange value over which exclusive rights can be contractually defined, protected and enforced. But to do this involves a whole series of metaphysical and epistemological assumptions about the nature of knowing as well as the norms of good knowing.

Lecture 2: A Decolonial Dialogic Approach as a Corrective Epistemology

Decolonial approaches emphasize the way that contexts inform and limit our knowing practices. This emphasis is meant to counter the hubris that claims a transcendent capacity for judgement. But after acknowledging context, how do we move to the next stage? Corrective approaches must expand on what it means to ‘know-with’ others. The ideal of responsiveness to an open, public sphere needs to factor in colonial histories and multiple, conflicting publics.

Spinoza Chair 1995-present

2022 - Charles Mills (Charles Mills passed away in late 2021, Lewis R. Gordon and Philomena Essed spoke in his place)
2021 - Robert Brandom (registration of lectures: A Rortyan Pragmatist Master-Argument and Hegel’s Recollective Account of Representation)
2019 - Catherine Malabou (registration of lectures: Beyond the 'archic' Principle and Morality and Horizontality)
2018 - Susan Wolf (registration of lectures: Aesthetic Responsibility and Selves Like Us)
2017 - Béatrice Longuenesse (registration of lectures: Perplexing I and Two unlikely bedfellows: Kant and Freud on Morality)
2016 - Jonathan Lear
2015 - Sally Haslanger
2014 - Quentin Skinner
2013 - Onora O’Neill 
2012 - Michael Friedmann
2011 - Cristina Lafont
2010 - Moira Gatens
2009 - Robert Pippin
2008 - Asma Barlas
2007 - Herman De Dijn, Jonathan Israel en Steven Nadler
2006 - John Dupré 
2005 - Bruno Latour 
2004 - Nancy Fraser
2003 - Hubert Dreyfus 
2002 - Judith Butler 
2001 - Hilary Putnam 
2000 - Seyla Benhabib 
1999 - Axel Honneth 
1998 - Stanley Cavell 
1997 - Richard Rorty 
1996 - Albrecht Wellmer 
1995 - Manfred Frank, Daniel C. Dennett en Will Kymlicka

Publications

The following texts of the Spinoza Lectures have been published by Van Gorcum: