This webinar is composed of two lectures from two Filipina philosophers. They talk about the phenomenon of internalized marginalization in the Philosophical Institution, as well as the positionality of their works which aim to question this phenomenon.
Christine Tan talks about her work in Chinese philosophy, an area which has largely been marginalized in mainstream philosophical discourse due to a history of epistemic violence in the formation of the philosophical canon. Drawing on the postcolonial insights of Gayatri Spivak on “sanctioned ignorance” and Edward Said on “native informants,” she stresses that liberalist calls for inclusivity and diversity are not enough to address marginalization in philosophy. Having shown the failure of extant “solutions,” the lecture offers preliminary suggestions for how we can better challenge the cultural and epistemic hegemony of Anglo-European philosophy.
Building on the first lecture’s critical analysis of the other-ing of non-Anglo-European philosophies, the second talk expands Tan’s critique by showing how such “other-ing” is also a form of “silencing.” Kelly Agra exposes how despite their purported emancipatory ideals, by participating in the other-ing of knowledges and the silencing of knowers, educational institutions such as academic philosophy may be reproducing existing systems of marginalization. Agra identifies epistemic paralysis as one of the epistemic, that are at the same time ethico-political, harms suffered by subjects in contexts of oppression and asymmetrical power relations. Epistemic paralysis, Agra argues, leads to the impoverishment and distortion of knowledges and to further dysfunctions in the subjects and societies that depend on them.
Bionotes of speakers:
Christine Abigail Tan is a Lecturer at Yale-NUS College, Singapore. She received her Ph.D. at Nanyang Technological University. Her dissertation focused on the notion of freedom in Neo-Daoist philosophy. Her main area of expertise is in Chinese philosophy, particularly Daoism and Neo-Daoism, Chinese metaphysics, and comparative philosophy, in relation to social and political philosophy. She has published on various topics in Chinese philosophy, including Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhist philosophy, among others.
Kelly Agra is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Philosophy and resident Ph.D. scholar at the Humanities Institute, of the University College Dublin, Ireland. She is the current Editor-in-Chief of Perspectives: UCD Postgraduate Journal of Philosophy. She is also affiliated with the University of the Philippines Baguio, Philippines, as an Assistant Professor of Philosophy (on study leave). Her work generally falls within the area of Critical Social Philosophy and Critical Social Epistemology. She has published articles in the philosophy of Alain Badiou, Japanese Philosophy, and Epistemic Injustice, among others. Her dissertation is entitled “Philosophy, the Philosophical Institution, and Epistemic Paralysis,” where she diagnoses how institutionalized philosophy reproduces what she terms as epistemic paralysis. Her studies are funded by the University of the Philippines (2019-2021) and the Irish Research Council (2021-2023).
Tremulous Speech: Other-ed and Silenced Subjects Talking Back to Philosophy