Quain 2024: The Contingent World | Lecture 1 of 3

Quain Lectures 2023/24 (Lecture 1 of 3)

The Contingent World

Speaker: Professor Amia Srinivasan (All Souls College, Oxford)

Convenors: Professors Jeff King and Kevin Toh, University College London

About the Lectures:

A 'critical genealogy' is an account of the origins of some thing of contemporary significance – a widespread belief, institution, practice, value, concept – put forward with the purpose of unseating or discrediting that thing. These lectures will think about critical genealogy in some of its historical, epistemological and political dimensions. Lecture 1 will trace the history of critical genealogy among the ancient Greeks, from the sixth century Ionian philosophers through the fifth century sophists to Plato. Lecture 2 will discuss analytic philosophy's ambivalent relationship to critical genealogy, and assess recent attempts by philosophers to genealogically debunk various targets including morality, theism, commonsense ontology and analytic philosophy itself. Lecture 3 will consider genealogy as a method of political critique, examining its possibilities and limits as a technique of liberation.

About the Speaker:

Amia Srinivasan is the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls College, Oxford. Her work spans across epistemology, ethics, political philosophy and feminist theory. Her book The Right to Sex was published in 2021. It was an instant Sunday Times bestseller and the recipient of the Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Transdisciplinary Philosophy, as well as Blackwell’s Book of the Year. She is a contributing editor of the London Review of Books, where she writes about politics, animals, technology, death, sex and other topics. Her essays have also appeared in the New Yorker, New York Review of Books, New York Times, and elsewhere.

**Please note that tickets for each Quain 2024 event need to be booked separately**

Lecture I: Monday 13 May, 6pm-8pm - reserve your ticket here

Lecture II: Wednesday 15 May, 12pm-2pm - reserve your ticket here

Lecture III: Thursday 16 May, 6pm-8pm - reserve your ticket here

Commentators' Seminar: Friday 17 May, 1pm-3pm - reserve your ticket here

Professor Srinivasan's three lectures will be followed on Friday, 17 May by a seminar to discuss the lectures with the following commentators:

• Prof. Adrian Blau, Professor of Politics in the Department of Political Economy at King's College London.
• Dr Sarah Bufkin, Assistant Professor in Political Theory, Department of Political Science and International Studies at University of Birmingham.
• Prof. MM McCabe, Professor of Ancient Philosophy Emerita at King's College London.

Photo by Tom Keldenich on Unsplash