Career Panel: Philosophy Alumni Supporting you to think about your next steps
Wednesday, 24th of March 3:00-4:30pm, ZOOM LINK BELOW
Now is a good time to begin reflecting on your future career. Next week the department will be co-hosting a panel with the King’s College Alumni Association (KCLA) on careers for philosophy graduates. This is an opportunity for you to hear about the types of work recent alums of the department have gone into, and be supported on your next steps. Panellists will give some practical tips to you about applying for jobs to enable you to feel more confident. There will also be an opportunity for you to ask questions. Please find the Zoom link below.
The panel will consist of:
Hannah Bondi – Public Affairs Coordinator at the International Justice Mission, a non-governmental anti-slavery organisation.
Kristina Pakhomchik – Strategy Officer at the World Ethical Data Forum, a non-profit organisation focused on the ethical development of technology.
Esther Ezegbe – Digital Relationship Manager at ikigai, a start up app which combines wealth management and everyday banking. Founder of Root2philosophy, which aims to improve access to study philosophy for Black and minority ethnic people.
The session will be introduced and compered by Benjamin Hunt, previous President of the King’s students’ union 2016-17, who now works in education policy at the regulator for higher education, the Office for Students.
Check your email (inbox) reminder for zoom link details.
The ‘Black Canoe’ Haida artwork on the Canadian $20 bill
Dominic Lopes, philosopher of aesthetics at the University of British Columbia, spoke at the Mark Sainsbury lecture about a new kind of injustice, aesthetic injustice, which will be the subject of his forthcoming book, Aesthetic Injustice: A Cosmopolitan Theory. This notion may be reminiscent to many of us of epistemic injustice, which has recently been an extremely salient and widely discussed topic in epistemology, ethics, and political philosophy.* According to Lopes, an aesthetic injustice is a large-scale social arrangement that harms people in their capacities as aesthetic agents, which capacities serve interests in value diversity and social autonomy. Lopes applied this notion to the cases of contact between different aesthetic cultures (such as contact between indigenous Haida and mainstream Canadian culture), and spoke about cases of cultural appropriation, the weaponization of the aesthetic, and what Haida artist Yahgulanaas dubbed the “Medusa Syndrome”, whereby outsiders to an aesthetic culture can petrify the aesthetic capacities of cultural insiders, presumably via many of the same kinds of mechanisms that work in stereotype threat (which can also lead to epistemic injustices). We eagerly await Lopes’ forthcoming work on aesthetic injustice, which promises, like the notion of epistemic injustice, to be extremely fruitful and salient in discussions about cultural equality and intercultural respect, and in our everyday lives.
* Miranda Fricker originated the term “epistemic injustice”. But, importantly, Rachel McKinnon notes that minority ethnic feminist philosophers had been working on issues of epistemic injustice for quite some time before its more recent widespread uptake.
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This is our first review of Dom Lopes’ presentation for the Mark Sainsbury Lecture, Tuesday 16th March 2021. Did you attend? Would you like to submit a review? If so, please contact vanessa.brassey@kcl.ac.uk.
REMINDER — Department of Philosophy, King’s College London
Join us for the Annual Mark Sainsbury Lecture
Tuesday 16 March 18:00-20:00
Dominic Lopes:
Aesthetic injustice
Abstract
People with different cultures come into contact with each other, and the contacts can go well or they can go badly. Indeed, if justice is goodness in the arrangement of social life, then arrangements of social life that shape cultural contact can be just or unjust. This lecture introduces a framework for thinking about what is special in contact between aesthetic cultures, in particular, and it proposes two interests that should be built into a theory of aesthetic justice. In proof of concept, the framework is briefly applied to cultural appropriation.
Dominic Lopes is Distinguished University Scholar and Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia. He has worked on pictorial representation; the aesthetic and epistemic value of pictures, including scientific images; theories of art and its value; the ontology of art; computer art and new art forms; and aesthetic value, wherever it may be found.
by Mari Maldal (2nd Year Philosophy & War Studies).
In Albert Camus’ book, The Plague, Camus describes the unfolding of an event that has become very familiar to us during the last year; an epidemic. I want to start with highlighting this section of the book, which describes the lockdown ending:
“[O]f all those days and weeks and months of life lost to their love made them vaguely feel they were entitled to some compensation; this present hour of joy should run at half the speed of those long hours of waiting.”
Like most of us, I had many plans for 2020. My friends and I were going to travel around the UK, go to concerts, work our way through the entire menu at Spoons, and eat crappy meal deals at the Maughan while complaining about how much work we have to do, while doing absolutely nothing. I had finally discovered the free coffee machine in the Philosophy building and I was planning to make that international tuition fee worth it. This all came to a sudden halt when the world got put in a time out.
What I believe I lost the most, beside all of these exciting events, was time. Just time. Time with my friends. Time to finally being independent. Time to grow, and to create, and to be. Your student years are supposed to be some of the best years of your life, and they were finally here. It seems like a cosmic joke to get five months of it, only for it to be ripped from your hands, and end up back in your childhood room. It certainly feels like something was taken from me. Was it?
If we buy into the idea that the future exists in a similar sense as the present, it seems reasonable to me to claim that the only future that is real, is the one that is actualized. Therefore, saying “we were robbed” is a sentiment that acknowledges the feeling of being wronged, but can we really be robbed of a future that was never going to happen?
It may seem counterintuitive to suggest this. Naturally something was taken from us. If a robber steals my computer, the court would not tell me that the future in which I kept my computer was never going to happen, so I might as well accept my new computer-less existence. Of course the virus could have been avoided. Had we prepared more, had we listened to the scientists, had things unfolded differently…
But this didn’t happen. What I am questioning here is whether the future, an unfolding of a state of affairs, can really be thought of as a material possession. Was the covid-free future taken from me, if that possible future was never going to be actualized in the first place? If a person buys a computer from the store, do I get to claim it was stolen from me, because I had the intention of buying it?
I guess what I am trying to do here is to rationalize the notion that a covid-free future was never really mine in the first place. I only ever had the idea of it. Perhaps this is just an attempt to make myself feel better, to accept the current situation as solidified in reality. What has been one of the hardest things for me about this last year, besides the sickness itself, is the memory of how things used to be. Camus describes the feeling perfectly here:
“A loveless world is a dead world, and always there comes an hour when one is weary of prisons, of one’s work, and of devotion to duty, and all one craves is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart.“
Perhaps all this talk about being robbed doesn’t matter. Perhaps, while it may be irrational to say we were robbed of a covid-free 2020, we can simply say we were robbed, period. A big part, if not most, of the human experience is not rational at all. This last year has been incredibly hard, we have all gone through something very painful, and we have experienced our hopes and plans for the future taken away. This is a wrong indeed.
And yet, someday, not too far from now, we will meet again. We will step out of our bubbles and into the world, feel the sun on our faces, and smile. It will be alright. For while that hope of the future may have been taken from us, the crime committed is perhaps more closely described as an involuntary loan, rather than a permanent theft.
We are approaching the finish line, and we can see, in the distance, if we look hard enough, a little, bright thing with feathers.
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Please get in touch with vanessa.brassey@kcl.ac.uk if you would like to reply to this post or post something on a topic you have been thinking about.
Join us at the Career Panel: A Philosophy Alumni Supporting you to think about your next steps
Wednesday, 24th of March 3:00-4:30pm (look out for a zoom link which will be sent by email)
Are you thinking about your next steps after graduating? Now is a good time to begin reflecting on what you might want to do next, whether this is further study or applying for jobs. The Philosophy Department, in collaboration with the KCL Alumni Association (KCLA), has organised a panel Q&A with three recent graduates to talk about their different career experiences and to give you some tips and support when you’re thinking through your next steps. The panel consists of:
Hannah Bondi – Public Affairs Coordinator at the International Justice Mission, a non-governmental anti-slavery organisation.
Kristina Pakhomchik – Strategy Officer at the World Ethical Data Forum, a non-profit organisation focused on the ethical development of technology.
Esther Ezegbe – Digital Relationship Manager at ikigai, a start up app which combines wealth management and everyday banking. Founder of Root2philosophy, which aims to improve access to study philosophy for Black and minority ethnic people.
The session will be introduced and compered by Benjamin Hunt, previous President of the King’s students’ union 2016-17, who now works in education policy at the regulator for higher education, the Office for Students.
International Women’s Day (IWD) is a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women. The occasion is being celebrated by the faculty and to find out more about the schedule of events go here. To find out more about International Women’s Day (IWD) go here. For the most up to date information from the faculty, follow the twitter account @kingsartshums.
Distinguished University Scholar and Professor Dominic Lopes
The Department of Philosophy, King’s College London is delighted to welcome
Dominic Lopes
on Tuesday 16 March 18:00-20:00
for the Annual Sainsbury Lecture on the topic of
Aesthetic injustice
Dominic Lopes is Distinguished University Scholar and Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia. He has worked on pictorial representation; the aesthetic and epistemic value of pictures, including scientific images; theories of art and its value; the ontology of art; computer art and new art forms; and aesthetic value, wherever it may be found.
Dominic Lopes is Distinguished University Scholar and Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia. A member of the UBC aesthetics group, he has worked on pictorial representation; the aesthetic and epistemic value of pictures, including scientific images; theories of art and its value; the ontology of art; computer art and new art forms; and aesthetic value, wherever it may be found.
His most recent books are a collection of his essays on methodological themes, Aesthetics on the Edge: Where Philosophy Meets the Human Sciences, a book on Being for Beauty: Aesthetic Agency and Value, and Les Arts et les images: Dialogues avec Dominic McIver Lopes. Many of his books have been or are being translated into Chinese, Farsi, French, Japanese, and Korean. Lopes is now at work on a book on Aesthetic Injustice: A Cosmopolitan Theory. He is also co-authoring Aesthetic Life and Why It Matters with Bence Nanay and Nick Riggle and The Geography of Taste with Samantha Matherne, Mohan Matthen, and Bence Nanay. Both books will be published by OUP.
Don’t miss The Asylum Monologues, an online event which is taking place on Friday 5 March at 12:00 via Zoom.
What are the Asylum Monologues?
Scripted by Sonja Linden & Christine Bacon, the monologues have been created to be performed as part of the Human Rights project. Asylum Monologues is a first-hand account of the UK’s asylum system in the words of people who have experienced it.
Launched at Amnesty International in June 2006, it has been touring the UK ever since and is performed on request.
The King’s community has been invited to attend a performance for free via zoom. Please check your emails for details including the link to your upcoming performance.
Before coming to King’s, I was a postdoctoral fellow in PPE program at Virginia Tech. The campus is located in beautiful Blacksburg, which sits right next to the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia. Before this, I completed my PhD just next door to King’s at the London School of Economics.
What will you be teaching this term?
In Semester 1 I taught History of Political Philosophy. The module considered authors chronologically but was split in two themes. The first half examined the social contract theories of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jacques-Rousseau. Core themes that we considered included natural law, political obligation and legitimacy. The second half focused on accounts of freedom and unfreedom, including Mary Wollstonecraft, J. S. Mill, Frederick Douglass and Karl Marx. Core themes included the possibility for freedom in society along with how to how to diagnose and oppose forms of unfreedom.
In Semester 2 I am teaching Morality and Convention, a module that examines the role that social convention plays in morality. The module addresses the following general questions. First, what is a social convention and what is it for a convention to be in force in a given population, how are such conventions learnt or transmitted and how do they change? Second how ought we to react to the existence of a certain convention in our community? Third, how much of the social fabric of a developed society is conventional. There are norms defining family structures, games, and personal relationships (friendship, neighbourliness), systems of property rights and private law, rules of etiquette and communication etc. Are these rules, systems and norms purely conventional, partly conventional or not conventional at all?
How did you get into philosophy?
The initial spark came from music, as I recall! I remember listening to bands like The Clash midway through high school and being fascinated by the political themes in their lyrics. This led me to read around and eventually take up philosophy at A Level, where we studied Sartre’s Existential is a Humanism, along with modules such as political philosophy and epistemology. After this, I was hooked!
Your doctorate focused on the ethics of risk and uncertainty.Can you give us the 2 minute elevator pitch summarizing your contribution?
My doctorate examined a set of questions in the area of the ethics of risk and uncertainty. One of the core questions was how should the presence of risk and uncertainty affect how we distribute a benefit to which individuals have competing claims? In response, I developed and defended an egalitarian theory of distributive ethics that is sensitive to the presence of risk and severe uncertainty (where it is not possible to assign probabilities to potential outcomes). I argued that some types of risk can themselves ground complaints from those who are subject to them, whereas others cannot. I also argued that severe uncertainty (where we cannot assign a precise probability to a potential outcome) can itself constitute a burden that ought to be distributed equally where possible.
A further question of the doctorate was how one should approach doing good (such as saving some people from harm) when there is a risk that in doing so one will enable an evildoer to commit harm. I had in mind real-world cases such as the provision of United Nations humanitarian aid to civilians in Syria in 2016, where there were fears the aid would further enable the Syrian government and lead to a manipulation of the aid for nefarious purposes. I defended a “clean hands” view and argued that in the type of “villain-enabling” cases that I described, those who provide aid can do so permissibly.
How do you balance the intellectual with the practicalities of daily life?
I think I struggle to separate them! I find it easier to separate the intellectual from the mundane practicalities of daily life, but I find it difficult to separate the intellectual from my hobbies. A couple of these are Chess and the official Fantasy Premier League game (where I try to put my interest in decision-making under conditions of risk and uncertainty to use).
You write on lotteries and fairness. Recently, you suggested fairness requires weighting lottery cases to reflect weighted claims to the good. What might be counted as a weighted claim to the good for you?
A lottery is weighted when one potential recipient receives a greater chance than another. A claim is a reason why someone ought to receive a good. For example, a person will have a claim on a medicine if they need it in order to cure a disease. The weight of a claim is determined by its comparative strength. For example, if, when everything else is equal, I need the medicine twice as much than you do, then my claim can be said to be twice as weighty as yours. A weighted lottery is a way of allocating goods in proportion to this comparative strength (e.g. if I need the medicine twice as much, then I get twice as much chance than you in a lottery).
Weighted lotteries have been used for such things as school admissions in the U.S., and for the allocation of scarce COVID-19 treatments (where those who need the treatment more get a higher chance than those who need it less, but everyone still gets a chance of receiving the treatment). In a recent paper, I argue that fairness requires the use of a weighted lottery when some individuals have stronger claims to an indivisible good than others. I argue against rival positions which say either that we ought to just give the good directly to the person with the stronger claim, or that we ought to use a weighted lottery only sometimes, such as when the strength of claims to a good are only slightly unequally strong.
What is the puzzle that keeps you awake at night?
One puzzle that has been occupying me recently is how it is that a risk of harm could itself be harmful, even when the “victim” is completely unaware of the risk, and the risky action doesn’t result in the harm that it threatens. A few authors have recently argued that such risks can be harmful. I have some work in progress which tries to address this problem, where I argue that risks themselves aren’t harmful because they do not interfere with the “victim’s” interests in the right way. But this still feels a little unsatisfactory to me!
The Peter Sowerby Chair leads the Philosophy & Medicine Project, launched in 2015 with the generous support of the Peter Sowerby Foundation. The Project is a joint venture between King’s Department of Philosophy, the Faculty of Life Sciences and Medicine, and The Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery.
The Project seeks to foster interdisciplinary links between philosophy and medicine, by teaching philosophy as part of the medical curriculum, and by hosting a range of public lectures, events and activities.
The Project’s 2020 Annual Lecture, ‘What Does it Mean to Be Healthy?’, will be delivered by Robyn Bluhm (MSU), online, on December 16. For more information and to register, click here.
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