[SydPhil] University of Sydney Philosophy Seminar Series, Jessica Isserow, (University of Notre Dame, Indiana)

[Ryan Cox]

Hi everyone,

This week's speaker in the University of Sydney Philosophy Seminar Series is Jessica Isserow, (University of Notre Dame, Indiana)

The title of the talk is "On Being Overlooked: The ethics of praise and the ethics of attention". Here is an abstract for the talk:

Praise—“the brighter side of moral responsibility” (Montminy 2022, p.28)—has traditionally been regarded as unproblematic. Understandably so; it’s hard to take moral offence at agents expressing pride, esteem, or admiration for one another. But praise has a dark side. It can be self-aggrandising (Jeppsson & Brandenburg 2022), for instance, or hypocritical (Telech 2024). Some patterns of praise also play an under-appreciated role in supporting structures of oppression (Holroyd 2021, 2023). Like these theorists, I believe that there are grounds to be critical of our practices of positive recognition. My primary interest is the distribution of praise—specifically, the phenomenon of “being overlooked”: many people receive less praise than others not as a result of their lesser merit, but because their achievements or excellences happen to be less visible. Reflection on such cases reveals something important: our patterns of praise reinforce existing disadvantages in under-recognised ways. The remedy, I argue, is not so much to police praise itself as it is to pay greater attention to how we distribute attention.

The seminar will take place at 3:30pm on Wednesday Nov 13 in the Philosophy Seminar Room (N494).

Please note that this is the final seminar in the official seminar series this year. An additional, informal, out-of-semester, seminar is scheduled for Wednesday Dec 04. The speaker for this seminar is Alejandro Naranjo Sandoval, (University of California, Davis).

Enquiries about the seminar series can be directed to ryan.cox at sydney.edu.au

Ryan Cox
Associate Lecturer in Philosophy
Discipline of Philosophy
School of Humanities
University of Sydney
ryan.cox at sydney.edu.au
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