Annual KTS Center Lecture

The annual KTS Center lecture is delivered each year by a distinguished academic who has made significant contributions to philosophical debates of concern to the KTS Center.

2021-22

Lewis Gordon (UConn)

'TBC'

ABSTRACT: To follow.

Lewis Gordon is Professor of Philosophy and Departmental Chair at UConn. He works on Africana philosophy, existentialism, phenomenology, social and political theory, postcolonial thought, theories of race and racism, philosophies of liberation, aesthetics, philosophy of education, and philosophy of religion. His most recent books include What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction To His Life And Thought (Fordham University Press, 2015) and Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization (Routledge, 2021).

2020-21

Miranda Fricker (CUNY)

'”Forgive me!” Why You Can’t Always Get What You Deserve'

ABSTRACT: There are many different kinds of reasons to forgive—that the wrongdoer has apologized, that not forgiving is destroying a valued friendship, that you don’t even want to be this angry person any more …-- and yet no matter how many such reasons may accumulate in a given case, and no matter how much the wrongdoer may deserve to be forgiven, still these reasons can never generate a rights-claim on their part that you forgive them. Why not? I compare the case of gratitude, and ultimately offer an explanation in terms of the pragmatic self-refutation involved in the very idea of being forgiven under requirement.

Miranda Fricker is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her publications include The Epistemic Life of Groups: Essays in the Epistemology of Collectives (coeditor, 2016); Applied Epistemology, special issue of the Journal of Applied Philosophy (coeditor, 2016), Reading Ethics, (coauthor and editor, 2009), Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (2007), and the Cambridge Companion to Feminism in Philosophy, (coeditor, 2000). She was awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2014-16); and is currently finishing work on a book in moral philosophy, Blaming and Forgiving: The Work of Morality (forthcoming OUP).