Papers:
‘Epistemic Hopelessness and Other Vices of Oppression’ in Hypatia (forthcoming)
‘Should Political Philosophers Attend to Victim Testimony?’ in Journal of Applied Philosophy (2023)
‘Rawlsian Liberalism as a Failure of Critique’ in Pathology Diagnosis and Social Research: New Applications and Explorations, ed. Neal Harris 2021, London: Palgrave MacMillan
‘False Consciousness and The Socially Extended Mind’ in Perspectives . International Postgraduate Journal of Philosophy 2016, 6(1): 24-35
Review of The Left Hemisphere: Mapping Critical Theory Today by Razmig Keucheyan, in Marx & Philosophy Review of Books 02/03/2016
‘Henri Bergson’s Rejection of Substance Ontologies’ in Filosofisk Supplement 2015, 11(3): 15-22
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Book: The Personal, The Epistemic, and the Political
(forthcoming with Routledge)
Feminist philosophers and activists have long treated victim testimony as both epistemically and morally significant, and in the past decade this idea has gained a prominent place in public and academic discourse. Analytic political philosophers, however, generally do not engage with victim insights and perspectives. Should they attend to it, and if so, how should it shape theoretical practice? This book argues that victim testimony is not merely morally important, but an indispensable epistemic resource for identifying injustice. However, its philosophical significance depends on the methods through which it is generated, interpreted, and integrated into theory. Without such methodological attention, political philosophy risks either ignoring important forms of injustice or incorporating testimony in distorted ways. Thus, the book defends the claim that political philosophy must engage victim testimony as an epistemic resource, but only under specific methodological conditions. Failure to do so risks reproducing injustice within our theoretical frameworks.
This book fills a gap in the literature on the intersections of political methodology and feminist epistemology: while political epistemology has become a prominent field in recent years, the same is not the case for epistemologically informed political philosophy. I propose that political philosophers should employ epistemological tools for acquiring a better, less biassed understanding of injustice, and that this also has consequences for how we develop our conceptions of what justice consists in. Currently this is generally not done within the field of political philosophy. In so doing, I bring political epistemology to bear on political philosophy. Further, this book falls into a larger methodological discussion in political philosophy, which considers the variety of ways in which we should relate an analysis of pressing real-life political problems to broader normative, abstract theorising about concepts such as justice. These debates have failed to seriously engage with victim perspectives, and the range of epistemological and ethical questions discussed in this book. I therefore bring a unique and necessary perspective to this debate, which sharpens our sense of what is at stake, and where and how we should focus our attention.
Ane Engelstad 