Fall 2024 Populism & Religion Seminar 1

On Wednesday, 16 October, 2024 (16:15–18:00) on Zoom, Dr. Genia Schönbaumsfeld, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton, will give a webinar presentation titled "Partners in Crime? Radical Scepticism and Malevolent Global Conspiracy Theories."

Although academic work on conspiracy theory has taken off in the last two decades, both in other disciplines as well as in epistemology, the similarities between global sceptical scenarios and global conspiracy theories have not been the focus of attention. The main reason for this lacuna probably stems from the fact that most philosophers take radical scepticism very seriously, while, for the most part, regarding ‘conspiracy thinking’ as epistemically defective. In this paper, I show that global sceptical scenarios and global conspiracy theories exhibit similarly problematic features – something that causes trouble for the ‘orthodox’ view which holds that while radical scepticism is an important challenge that epistemologists must confront, global conspiracy theories can just be dismissed. If I am right, however, that both scenarios are similarly defective, this gives us good reason to be suspicious of both.

Genia Schönbaumsfeld is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton and the author of A Confusion of the Spheres – Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein on Philosophy and Religion (Oxford University Press, 2007), The Illusion of Doubt (Oxford University Press, 2016), and Wittgenstein on Religious Belief (Cambridge University Press, 2023). In 2023, she was awarded a highly prestigious 2.5m ERC Advanced Grant for her project entitled ‘The Ethics of Doubt – Kierkegaard, Scepticism and Conspiracy Theory.’

You can follow the 'Ethics of Doubt' project on X (Twitter) @Ethics_of_Doubt.

Zoom: https://lu-se.zoom.us/j/62645329724

Meeting ID: 626 4532 9724

16h15–18h00, Swedish time [CEST]