Uchenna Okeja: “Transformation and Progress in Philosophy”

We are very happy to invite you to a talk by Uchenna Okeja, professor of philosophy at Rhodes University, currently visiting Utrecht University, entitled “Transformation and Progress in Philosophy” (see the abstract below).

Uchenna Okeja

(Rhodes University)

Transformation and Progress in Philosophy

Tuesday, January 17th, 15:30-17:00

Drift 25, Room 102

If you would like to attend this event, please register here.

Abstract

Does philosophy make progress? There are many ways to answer this question. One possibility is to consider whether philosophers have found answers to the questions they investigate. Another approach would be to recount the new fields of inquiry that developed from philosophy and argue that, although philosophers disagree on everything, including the definition of their field, they nonetheless make progress by generating new disciplines. In this talk, I argue that the dominant perspectives on progress in philosophy rely on inferences drawn from the history or method of the discipline. Using empirical data, I demonstrate the limitations of these approaches and highlight why we should think about progress in philosophy as a form of internal transformation.

Uchenna Okeja is a professor of philosophy and head of the department of philosophy at Rhodes University. He is also a research associate at Nelson Mandela University, South Africa. His background is in political philosophy, ethics, and critical theory. He is the author of Deliberative Agency (Indiana University Press, 2022).

If you would like to attend this event, please register here.