Dr Miranda Fricker, University of London Research Fellow (September to December 2010)
Miranda Fricker is Reader in Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London. She did her DPhil at the University of Oxford (1996), moving to the University of London to take up a Jacobsen Research Fellowship and then a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship. Her book, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (OUP, 2007), explores how relations of social power and identity impinge in our epistemic practices to produce distinctively epistemic forms of injustice—injustices in which someone is undermined specifically in their capacity as a knower. She co-edited The Cambridge Companion to Feminism in Philosophy with Jennifer Hornsby (2000); and she is co-author of Reading Ethics, written with Sam Guttenplan, a textbook of commentaries on selected readings in moral philosophy (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). Her main areas of interest are ethics, social epistemology, virtue epistemology, and those areas of feminist philosophy that focus on issues of power, social identity, and epistemic authority.
She has been a regular discussant on radio programmes in the UK such as BBC Radio4’s ‘In Our Time’, and there are podcasts of interviews with her about her book, and about ethical relativism, downloadable from www.philosophybites.com and iTunes, or via her web page www.bbk.ac.uk/phil/staff/academics/fricker2
Her current work is on ethical relativism; and also on how to model collective virtues and vices—those in particular that institutional bodies such as juries, research teams, or police forces might possess. She hopes to explore the political significance of the absence or presence of virtues of epistemic justice in our public institutions.
She will be in post as the Research Fellow from 1 September until 31 December.
