Utopia as Social Critique

 

Utopias have been critiqued as unrealistic, unnecessary, and dangerous by voices from both liberal and radical political camps. Yet, utopias have many of these problems only when they are understood as blueprints for societies of the future. I defend a critical function of utopias according to which they serve to undermine assumptions about both the desirability and the inevitability of the status quo, rather than providing a plan for the construction of an ideal future.

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Epistemic Emancipation

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How can individuals learn about injustice and oppression when those shape and distort their epistemic resources? While social and feminist epistemology has analysed this distortion, I am interested in the possibility of knowledge despite it and therefore also in the possibility of this analysis itself. I identify and examine three loopholes in social and epistemic oppression which enable social critique: hermeneutical gaps are not only epistemic injustices, as suggested by Miranda Fricker, they are also opportunities for epistemic emancipation; metaphors not only make an audience see their target in a particular light, as suggested by Donald Davidson, but in a plausible light and thereby push for a change of mind—including a change of mind concerning injustice; and utopias play a necessary role for social critique—pace non-ideal theorists—when they challenge assumptions about the unalterability of the status quo. 

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I also have an interest in historical women philosophers, having worked in particular on Rahel Varnhagen. 

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see 'short cv' for publications 

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