The Importance of Political Epistemology

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mindscape listeners are very familiar with ideas like cognitive biases or you know ways in which we can be irrational But this is a slightly different slant. Political epistemology is an attempt to connect the study of knowledge with questions about How politics works and how it doesn't work And that really was the kind of inspiration for my book. I try to account for them using this notion which you mentioned the notion of an intellectual or an epistemic Vice.

All of us have been wrong about things from time to time. But sometimes it was a simple, forgivable mistake, while other times we really should have been correct. Properties that systematically prevent us from being correct, and for which we can legitimately be blamed, are “intellectual vices.” Examples might include closed-mindedness, wishful thinking, overconfidence, selective attention, and so on. Quassim Cassam is a philosopher who studies knowledge in various forms, and who has recently written a book Vices of the Mind: From the Intellectual to the Political. We talk about the nature of intellectual vices, how they manifest in people and in organizations, and what we can possibly do to correct them in ourselves.

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Quassim Cassam received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Oxford University. He is currently Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. He previously held faculty positions at Cambridge University and University College London. He has served as the president of the Aristotelian Society, and was awarded a Leadership Fellowship by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK.

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