Extractivism as a model for Modern Epistemology

Extractivist epistemologies work analogously to extractivist capitalism: seeking an epistemic resource of some sort---such as a piece of pharmacological knowledge held by an indigenous community or rural healer concerning the medicinal potential of a given plant, or an artifact from an indigenous funeral site. The extractivist epistemic approach treats this epistemic resource as separable from its origin, and then renders it into a knowledge commodity with exchange value over which exclusive rights can be contractually defined, protected and enforced. But to do this involves a whole series of metaphysical and epistemological assumptions about the nature of knowing as well as the norms of good knowing.

Programme

19:00: open to public 
20:00 welcome/opening words 
20:15 start of lecture 
21:00 questions audience
21:30 closing and invitation for a drink and snacks 
22:30 end 

About Linda Martín Alcoff

Linda Martín Alcoff, originally from Panama, is Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York. She earned her PhD at Brown University after doing undergraduate work at Florida State University and Georgia State University.

Her books include Rape and Resistance: Understanding the Complexities of Sexual Violation; The Future of Whiteness; Visible Identities: Race, Gender and the Self, which won the Frantz Fanon Award; and Real Knowing: New Versions of the Coherence Theory. She has published 12 edited books and over 100 articles. Her writings have appeared in the New York Times, Aeon, the NY Indypendent, among others. For over a decade she has taught courses on decolonial philosophy and epistemology in Spain, Australia and South Africa. She was elected President of the American Philosophical Association in 2012, and in 2021 she was named by Academic-Influence.com as one of the ten most influential philosophers today. In 2023, Alcoff was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

About the Spinoza Lectures

Since 1995, the Philosophy Department of the University of Amsterdam has annually appointed a foreign philosopher to the Spinoza chair. As part of the appointment, the Spinoza professor gives a number of lectures intended for a broad audience that wants to stay informed about contemporary developments in philosophy.