Adebayo Oluwayomi

Epistemologists have recently started appealing to the moral philosophy literature on interpersonal trust in order to help explain the epistemology of testimony. We argue that epistemologists who have given trust a significant role in their accounts of the epistemology of testimony have appealed to very different conceptions of the nature of trust, which have inevitably influenced the shape of their epistemological theorizing. Some have employed accounts of the nature of interpersonal trust according to which trust is a practical phenomenon subject to the will and to practical reasoning. Such accounts face the task of showing how the practical phenomenon that is interpersonal trust has epistemic implications for testimonial belief. Other theorists have employed accounts of the nature of interpersonal trust according to which trust is at least partly a cognitive phenomenon, itself subject to epistemic norms. Such accounts do not face the task of showing how practical rationality has implications for theoretical reason. Instead, they face the rather different tasks of showing how it is that cognitive trusting bears genuinely interpersonal features, and of how theoretical rationality can share features with practical rationality.

This paper examines the polemical nature of anti-racist education and discourse in America today. On one side of this issue are those who think of the efforts toward inclusion, diversity, and the pursuit of social justice in academia as serving positive ends. On the other side are those who oppose and vilify such efforts as evidence of the destructive ethos of liberal education. This has led to a situation where universities and schools across the country have seen professors and teachers, including philosophers, experience backlash for speaking seriously and courageously about confronting the problem of racism in society. One recent example of this anomaly is the kind of faux outrage or moral panic that drives the hysteria against Critical Race Theory, an inquiry that examines the intersection of race and law in the United States, as well as unearthing the reality of structural racism in America, often disguised in the mainstream liberal approaches to racial justice. This faux moral panic has been used by legislatures across the country, as the raison d’être, to pass bans and enforce policies or rules that restricts how professors (including philosophers), and teachers can talk about race, systemic racism, structural oppression, or the problem of racial injustice in the classroom. In this paper, I explore how this polemical situation creates significant challenges and unique possibilities for the discourse of philosophy, especially for those who are interested in becoming antiracist philosophers, in the context of such legal rules and restrictions. This is not for the faint of heart.