Lea Ypi on Dignity, History and Internet Trolls

Nov 30, 2025

Lea Ypi, a philosophy professor at the London School of Economics and author of "Indignity: A Life Reimagined," delves into her grandparents' complex history sparked by a Facebook photo and its trolling fallout. She explores profound themes like human dignity, moral agency, and the interplay of freedom versus structural forces. Ypi shares how she blended archival research with narrative to capture her grandparents’ lives amid tumultuous historical events, and she proposes that truth is a multifaceted concept shaped by diverse perspectives.

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ANECDOTE

Photo, Trolls And The Book's Origin

Lea Ypi discovered a previously unseen honeymoon photo of her grandparents posted in a public Facebook group with cruel comments.
That trolling episode triggered her decision to reconstruct her grandparents' lives and write Indignity.

INSIGHT

Dignity As Moral Agency

Ypi frames the book as a philosophical sequel to Free exploring dignity as Kantian moral agency.
She links dignity to the capacity to set and pursue moral ends despite hardship.

ANECDOTE

Tracing A Photo Into Secret Files

The book begins with the Facebook photo and Ypi's effort to trace its origin to state archives.
Her investigation asks who gets to tell a life story and what remains of dignity when the subject cannot respond.

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A few years ago, Lea Ypi was scrolling through Facebook when she came across a family photo she had never seen before. Someone had discovered a photograph of Ypi’s grandparents on their honeymoon and posted it on a public Facebook group. Ypi — a philosophy professor from Albania who teaches at the London School of Economics — was dismayed by the comments on the photograph, which ranged from inaccurate to judgmental to just plain mean. Were the husband and wife in this photo Albanian aristocrats? Fascist collaborators? Victims of Communism?

Responding to the trolls — as well as, as she puts it, “taking the trolls seriously” — Ypi decided to write a book reconstructing her grandparents’ story. The result is Indignity: A Life Reimagined, a book which asks, among other things, what does human dignity really mean? What makes this book even more interesting is that Ypi’s grandparents lived through some of the most dramatic moments in the twentieth century: the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the rise of Fascism, and World War II.

Ypi joins Damir and Santiago, who want to understand Ypi’s own philosophical priors. Damir wants to know where moral responsibility ends and and the structural forces of history begin. Santiago asks whether dignity, as a concept, has a metaphysical foundation. The result is a wide-ranging conversation that covers history, literature, philosophy and more.

In our bonus section for paid subscribers, Santiago asks Ypi about the difference between Fascist and Communist decision-making; Damir presses Ypi on the question of free will; Ypi discusses her two-point prescription for a better Europe; Santiago asks Ypi whether it’s hard to write about one’s country in a foreign language; and finally, Ypi’s hot take on Zohran Mamdani.

Required Reading:

* Lea Ypi, Indignity: A Life Reimagined (Amazon).

* Lea Ypi, Free: Coming of Age at the End of History (Amazon).

* Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (Amazon).

* Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man (Amazon).

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