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Department of Philosophy

Academic Staff

Dr Miranda Fricker

email: m.fricker (at) bbk.ac.uk

Miranda Fricker is Reader in the School of Philosophy. She did the DPhil at the University of Oxford (1996), first moving to the University of London to take up a Jacobsen Research Fellowship and then a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship. Her main areas of interest are in ethics, epistemology, and in those regions of feminist philosophy that concern social identity, power, and the authority of reason. Her book, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (OUP, 2007), explores how relations of social power and identity impinge in our epistemic practices to produce distinctively epistemic forms of injustice—injustices in which someone is undermined specifically in their capacity as a knower. She co-edited The Cambridge Companion to Feminism in Philosophy with Jennifer Hornsby (2000); and she is co-author of Reading Ethics, written with Sam Guttenplan, an introductory textbook giving interactive commentaries on classic texts in moral philosophy (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008). Most recently her work has focussed on the significance of situating our epistemic practices, including moral epistemic practices, in time - both real time, and the semi-fictional time of genealogical explanation.

In 2009 she gave the Simone Weil Lectures on Human Value, held in Sidney and Melbourne. View details

Books:

  • Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (OUP, 2007) - view abstract; read online reviews in (i) Notre Dame Philosophical Review and (ii) Philosophy (2009), 84 147-151 Cambridge University Press; download Times Literary Supplement review (in pdf format)
  • Reading Ethics: an interactive commentary on selected texts in moral philosophy, co-written with Sam Guttenplan (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008) - view details
  • The Cambridge Companion to Feminism in Philosophy, co-edited with Jennifer Hornsby (CUP, 2000) - view details

Selected Papers:

  • ‘Scepticism and The Genealogy of Knowledge: Situating Epistemology in Time’ (Philosophical Papers, Vol. 37 (1) 2008: pp. 27-50) - view abstract/request paper
  • ‘The Value of Knowledge and The Test of Time’, Epistemology, Royal Institute of Philosophy Series (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2008) - view paper
  • ‘Powerlessness and Social Interpretation’, Episteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology Vol. 3 Issue 1-2 (2006); 96-108 - view abstract or paper
  • ‘Epistemic Injustice and A Role for Virtue in the Politics of Knowing’, Metaphilosophy vol. 34 Nos. 1/2 Jan 2003; reprinted in M. Brady and D. Pritchard eds. Moral and Epistemic Virtues (Blackwell, 2003) - view abstract
  • ‘Life-Story in Beauvoir’s Memoirs’, The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir ed. Claudia Card (CUP, 2003) - view abstract
  • ‘Confidence and Irony’, Morality, Reflection, and Ideology ed. Edward Harcourt (OUP, 2000) - view abstract
  • ‘Pluralism Without Postmodernism’, The Cambridge Companion to Feminism in Philosophy eds. M. Fricker and J. Hornsby (CUP, 2000) - view abstract

Podcasts:

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Department of Philosophy, School of Social Sciences, History and Philosophy, Birkbeck, University of London, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX. Departmental Office tel: +44 (0)20 7631 6383, fax: +44 (0)20 7631 6564, email: office@philosophy.bbk.ac.uk