Ane Engelstad

José Medina famously argues that privileged groups are prone to epistemic vices, while belonging to an oppressed group often is accompanied by epistemic virtue. In this paper, I will nuance this picture by arguing that members of marginalized groups are also disposed to develop many of the same epistemic vices as everybody else, and also that there are specific, character-forming features of oppression that may dispose one to a specific kind of epistemic vice I call “epistemic hopelessness.” In light of this, I show that Medina’s argument about the distribution of epistemic vice and virtue based on oppression and marginalization only holds if we describe the epistemic virtues that members of marginalized groups are disposed to as reliably made available through collective group efforts. Thus, this paper nuances our understanding of the epistemic obstacles that prevent us from accessing knowledge of oppression, even for those with direct experience of oppression, without being epistemically defeatist about our capacity to access knowledge about injustices.

In this paper I present a problem for the Marxist idea of false consciousness, namely how it is vulnerable to accusations of dogmatism. I will argue that the concept must be further developed if it is to provide a plausible tool for systematic social analysis. In the second half of the paper I will show how this could be done if the account of false consciousness incorporates Shaun Gallagher’s theory of the socially extended mind. This is a theory that explores how the mind expands towards external objects and systems. I will conclude that it helps to reinstate false consciousness as a reliable tool for the analysis of cognitive dynamics within power structures.

The relationship between political philosophy and real-life politics is one that is heavily contested. On the one hand, it has been argued that political affiliation is a biasing force that stands in the way of our ability as political philosophers to maintain an objective perspective (Van der Vossen, 2015; 2020). On the other hand, it has been argued that political philosophers run the risk of bias whether they are politically active or not (Jones, 2020). In this paper, I nuance the debate at hand: I specify what kind of activism we should be concerned with as a biasing force, elaborate on what biases we should aim to mitigate as political philosophers, as well as what tools we have at our disposal in combatting biases within the discipline. This allows me to argue that participation in certain forms of political activism can be a powerful method for avoiding the most pernicious and pervasive biases we are prone to, namely biases against marginalised groups, and in favour of the political status quo. This has the implication that we must avoid a blanket ban on political activism within political philosophy, and instead recognise the epistemic merits of political activism where it is due.

In recent years, there have been an increasing number of attempts by analytic philosophers to engage with key insights of Critical Theory. While this has had some success within feminist philosophy, and in epistemology, with the emergence of political epistemology as a significant and productive subfield, analytic political philosophers have generally not explored what lessons can be learnt from attempting to bridge the disciplinary divide. In this chapter, I provide what I take to be the clearest explanation for this, namely the dominance of Rawlsianism within analytic political philosophy. Moreover, I argue that in its refusal to engage with core tenets of Critical Theory, Rawlsian political philosophy can be exploited as the mouthpiece of dominant ideologies. However, this is not a charge against analytic political philosophy in general, insofar as analytic political philosophers are willing to engage with Critical Theory, at the cost of dismissing Rawlsianism.

There is a growing recognition that victims of injustice may have privileged access to knowledge about the injustices they experience, and that injustices are perpetuated through silencing victims by taking them to be less credible, and through denying them the platform and capacity to speak. However, these are not ideas that political philosophers tend to engage with in a sustained manner, to the extent that they alter methodological approaches to be systematically attentive to victim testimony. In this article, I provide two arguments in favour of political philosophers attending to victim testimony, one moral, one epistemic, and demonstrate that the moral case has little purchase, but that the epistemic case is more successful. Then, I present the strongest case against including victim testimony in political philosophy, and I argue that it does not hold up to scrutiny. In so doing, I demonstrate how methodological practices in political philosophy could be improved through drawing on feminist social epistemology; attending to victim testimony can enrich political philosophy in epistemically acceptable ways, and it also corrects for a range of potential biases.

In this paper I present a problem for the Marxist idea of false consciousness, namely how it is vulnerable to accusations of dogmatism. I will argue that the concept must be further developed if it is to provide a plausible tool for systematic social analysis. In the second half of the paper I will show how this could be done if the account of false consciousness incorporates Shaun Gallagher’s theory of the socially extended mind. This is a theory that explores how the mind expands towards external objects and systems. I will conclude that it helps to reinstate false consciousness as a reliable tool for the analysis of cognitive dynamics within power structures.