April 28th, 2023 | 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM PT

Kaplan Hall 193 (and Zoom)

Hosted by Minorities and Philosophy (MAP) at UCLA

Zoom link: https://ucla.zoom.us/j/94960209231?pwd=Q3lLbnRzNXZPRkgxZ3FnOFFEbHVEZz09

Join us on April 28th, 2023 for a colloquium with Dr. Johnathan Flowers, California State University, Northridge. The talk will take place in Kaplan Hall Room 193 from 4:00PM – 6:00PM with a reception to follow.

RSVP HERE

Note: ASL interpreters will be available for the duration of the talk.

Against Philosophy, Against Inquiry

This talk will position the current practice of inquiry in philosophy, colloquially described as “just asking questions,” as enabling the maintenance of structures of oppression through the ways in which it refuses to grapple with the social, political, and cultural realities from which it emerges. This failure allows for the laundering of ableism and transphobia through scholarship that aims to “just ask questions” not just about the nature of gender identity and disability, but about the very humanity of trans and disabled persons. Finally, this talk will describe how the conflation of “just asking questions” with contemporary practices of inquiry in philosophy also serve to position objections to this practice of inquiry as “anti-philosophy,” or opposed to the very nature of philosophy and academia itself.

Johnathan Flowers is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Northridge. Flowers’s research areas include African American intellectual history, Japanese Aesthetics, American Pragmatism, Philosophy of Disability, and Philosophy of Technology. Flowers also works in the areas of Science and Technology Studies and Comics Studies, where he applies insights from American Pragmatism, Philosophy of Race, and Disability Studies to current issues in human/computer interaction, artificial intelligence and machine learning, and representations of identity in popular culture. His book, Mono no Aware and Gender as Affect in Japanese Aesthetics and American Pragmatism, is due out in April.

RSVP HERE