Feb 21, 2020 06:16 AM
A woman philosopher calls out misogyny in the 17th century
https://aeon.co/ideas/a-woman-philosophe...th-century
EXCERPT: The English philosopher Mary Astell (1666-1731) was a woman ahead of her time. She anticipated discoveries in the social dimension of knowledge and explanation that you might have thought were made only in the 21st century. She also revealed the existence of a form of epistemic – that is, knowledge- or thinking-related – injustice that’s caused by bad social conditions and fundamentally undermines how we think about ourselves. Despite being subjected to the very same conditions she identified, Astell managed to cut through the injustice to provide a new way of seeing things.
Epistemic injustice [...] is tricky to spot because it operates below our notice – it plays on stereotypes and prejudices that we might not even know we have ... There are many kinds of epistemic injustice, such as what the philosopher Miranda Fricker in 2007 called ‘testimonial injustice’ (eg, when someone’s claims aren’t taken seriously because the hearer thinks that people with that identity are unreliable) and ‘hermeneutical injustice’ (eg, when someone’s claims aren’t understood because the intellectual resources needed to make sense of them don’t exist since they’ve been left out of the process of creating concepts). It is a testimonial injustice to find black people less credible just because they are black. It is a hermeneutical injustice that the term ‘sexual harassment’ didn’t exist for a long time because women weren’t part of the conversation about what constitutes appropriate behaviour.
Some epistemic injustices, such as testimonial injustice, are based on credibility imbalances, and some, such as hermeneutical injustice, focus on interpretive resources, but the epistemic injustice that Astell discovered isn’t a kind of testimonial or hermeneutical injustice. For her, it wasn’t that other people fail to take women seriously because they’re women – it is that what she called ‘bad custom’ makes women underestimate their own credibility. And it isn’t that the resources to understand bad custom don’t exist, but that bad custom makes those resources inaccessible to women.
[...] According to Astell, custom is bad when it prevents us from developing our intellectual capacities as God intended. The best way to do this is through education, but in Astell’s time women weren’t formally educated (this practice was itself a part of bad custom). Bad custom is a problem because it damages women’s God-given nature – their ability to think properly. It undermines how women think partly because, without education, women are deprived of knowledge, but bad custom also corrupts thinking processes. It does this by creating prejudices, which are faulty lenses that filter how you see the world and thus what you can know. Even more concerning is that prejudices are habitual: the more you think in a prejudicial way, the harder it is to see the world differently. This effect is magnified in groups because there is no one to help you see clearly or just differently... (MORE - details)
In rural Russia, the days of Communism are fading from memory like fairytales
https://aeon.co/videos/in-rural-russia-t...fairytales
INTRO: Set in the frigid, snow-swept landscape of northern Russia, "Fairytale of the Three Bears" features three rural men reflecting on the seismic shifts in Russian culture and economics following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Amid their musings on the days before capitalism took hold, they do their best to recall and recount the film’s titular fable. With shots of abandoned machinery in the white landscape set to the haunting refrains of Russian folk songs, the film is a poignant reflection on how eras gone by can fade from memory while myths endure... (MORE - details, video)
https://aeon.co/ideas/a-woman-philosophe...th-century
EXCERPT: The English philosopher Mary Astell (1666-1731) was a woman ahead of her time. She anticipated discoveries in the social dimension of knowledge and explanation that you might have thought were made only in the 21st century. She also revealed the existence of a form of epistemic – that is, knowledge- or thinking-related – injustice that’s caused by bad social conditions and fundamentally undermines how we think about ourselves. Despite being subjected to the very same conditions she identified, Astell managed to cut through the injustice to provide a new way of seeing things.
Epistemic injustice [...] is tricky to spot because it operates below our notice – it plays on stereotypes and prejudices that we might not even know we have ... There are many kinds of epistemic injustice, such as what the philosopher Miranda Fricker in 2007 called ‘testimonial injustice’ (eg, when someone’s claims aren’t taken seriously because the hearer thinks that people with that identity are unreliable) and ‘hermeneutical injustice’ (eg, when someone’s claims aren’t understood because the intellectual resources needed to make sense of them don’t exist since they’ve been left out of the process of creating concepts). It is a testimonial injustice to find black people less credible just because they are black. It is a hermeneutical injustice that the term ‘sexual harassment’ didn’t exist for a long time because women weren’t part of the conversation about what constitutes appropriate behaviour.
Some epistemic injustices, such as testimonial injustice, are based on credibility imbalances, and some, such as hermeneutical injustice, focus on interpretive resources, but the epistemic injustice that Astell discovered isn’t a kind of testimonial or hermeneutical injustice. For her, it wasn’t that other people fail to take women seriously because they’re women – it is that what she called ‘bad custom’ makes women underestimate their own credibility. And it isn’t that the resources to understand bad custom don’t exist, but that bad custom makes those resources inaccessible to women.
[...] According to Astell, custom is bad when it prevents us from developing our intellectual capacities as God intended. The best way to do this is through education, but in Astell’s time women weren’t formally educated (this practice was itself a part of bad custom). Bad custom is a problem because it damages women’s God-given nature – their ability to think properly. It undermines how women think partly because, without education, women are deprived of knowledge, but bad custom also corrupts thinking processes. It does this by creating prejudices, which are faulty lenses that filter how you see the world and thus what you can know. Even more concerning is that prejudices are habitual: the more you think in a prejudicial way, the harder it is to see the world differently. This effect is magnified in groups because there is no one to help you see clearly or just differently... (MORE - details)
In rural Russia, the days of Communism are fading from memory like fairytales
https://aeon.co/videos/in-rural-russia-t...fairytales
INTRO: Set in the frigid, snow-swept landscape of northern Russia, "Fairytale of the Three Bears" features three rural men reflecting on the seismic shifts in Russian culture and economics following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Amid their musings on the days before capitalism took hold, they do their best to recall and recount the film’s titular fable. With shots of abandoned machinery in the white landscape set to the haunting refrains of Russian folk songs, the film is a poignant reflection on how eras gone by can fade from memory while myths endure... (MORE - details, video)