LATINA/X
Feminisms

ABSTRACT

A wealth of work in recent years is troubling the paradigm of knowing as an individual, conscious, and volitional practice. This paper will summarize some of this recent work and show how it is providing a new phenomenology of knowing as an experiential practice. But to call this ‘knowing’ raises questions: how can practices that are implicit and non-volitional be epistemically justified? This paper will argue that a radical reformulation of epistemic justification is called for by the new phenomenologies of knowing.

BIOGRAPHY

Linda Martín Alcoff is Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center.  Her writings have focused on social identity and race, epistemology and politics, sexual violence, Foucault, and Latino issues in philosophy. She has edited 10 books, including Feminist Epistemologies co-edited with Elizabeth Potter (Routledge, 1993) and The Blackwell Guide to Feminist Philosophy co-edited with Eva Feder Kittay (Blackwell 2006). She is also the author of two books: Visible Identities: Race, Gender and the Self (Oxford 2006), and Real Knowing: New Versions of the Coherence Theory (Cornell 1996) She is currently at work on two new books: a book on sexual violence, and an account of political epistemology. She is Vice-President elect of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division. She was named the Distinguished Woman in Philosophy for 2005 by the Society for Women in Philosophy, and in 2006 she was named one of the 100 Most Influential Hispanics in the United States by Hispanic Business magazine. Her book Visible Identities, won the Frantz Fanon Award in 2009.