April 27, 2012 STAFF/STU

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Today: The Shula Chair in Philosophy Presents: The Shula Lectures – Bodies and Identities

Linda Martín Alcoff, professor of philosophy at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center, will speak on “Knowing under the skin: new phenomenologies of embodied knowledge” on Friday, April 27, at 4 p.m. in the Donahue Auditorium of the Dolan Center for Science and Technology. The lecture is free and open to the public.

A wealth of work in recent years is troubling the paradigm of knowing as an individual, conscious, and volitional practice. This paper will summarize some of this recent work and show how it is providing a new phenomenology of knowing as an experiential practice. But to call this ‘knowing’ raises questions: how can practices that are implicit and non-volitional be epistemically justified? This paper will argue that a radical reformulation of epistemic justification is called for by the new phenomenologies of knowing.

Alcoff’s writings have focused on social identity and race, epistemology and politics, sexual violence, Foucault, and Latino issues in philosophy. She has edited 10 books, including Feminist Epistemologies co-edited with Elizabeth Potter (Routledge, 1993) and The Blackwell Guide to Feminist Philosophy co-edited with Eva Feder Kittay (Blackwell 2006). She is also the author of two books: Visible Identities: Race, Gender and the Self (Oxford 2006), and Real Knowing: New Versions of the Coherence Theory (Cornell 1996).

She is currently at work on two new books: a book on sexual violence, and an account of political epistemology. She is vice president elect of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division. She was named the Distinguished Woman in Philosophy for 2005 by the Society for Women in Philosophy, and in 2006 she was named one of the 100 Most Influential Hispanics in the United States by Hispanic Business magazine. Her book Visible Identities won the Frantz Fanon Award in 2009.