Abstract:
Responsibility is far from a fixed concept, and its various connections – to guilt, accountaiblity, duty, etc – are highly contested. This is especially the case when we turn to think about responsibility in the Anthropocene. For what has become evident is that liberal and linear conceptions of responsibility – focused on individual autonomy and direct, determinate forms of action – are hardly capable of making sense of our responsibility to both human and non-human others, including children and future generations. For this reason, alternative accounts of responsibility, founded on relationality and non-linearity, have become appealing. Simultaneously, it has become evident that resopnsibility must also involve the responsibility to know better – and, accordingly, to alter our frameworks and forms of knowledge. It is not clear, however, how epistemic responsibility – based on the knower-known model – can go hand in hand with relational resopnsibility. In this presentation, I will distinguish three forms of relational resopnsibility, and investigate the ways in which epistemic responsibility intersects with these forms. In so doing, I aim to offer an account of relational and epistemic responsibility that can address weaknesses in our current conceptualizations and shed new light on how these two crucial concepts can mutually extend and support one another.
Bio:
Dalia Nassar is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney. Her work sits at the intersection of the history of philosophy, the history of science, and environmental philosophy. Her most recent book, Romantic Empiricism: Nature, Art, and Ecology from Herder to Humboldt (OUP 2022), investigates an understudied tradition in early nineteenth-century philosophy, traces its influence on the history of ecology, and demonstrates its relevance for current environmental debates. With plant physiologist Margaret Barbour, she co-authored two papers on trees. And with Kristin Gjesdal she co-edited two volumes on women philosophers in the long nineteenth century, including Women Philosophers in the Long Nineteenth Century: The German Tradition (OUP 2021), which has been translated into Norwegian as Kvinner i filosofien (Cappelen Damm, 2022).