Thomas Kelly of Princeton University to Give Department of Philosophy 2024 Kraemer Lecture

The Department of Philosophy in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences is proud to present the 2024 Kraemer Lecturer, Thomas Kelly, professor of philosophy at Princeton University. This year's lecture is titled "Why Political Polarization Will Get Worse If People Are Reasonable" and will be given 3:30-5:30 p.m. Friday, April 5, in Giffels Auditorium (Old Main 201).

The Kraemer Lecture commemorates William S. Kraemer, who was chair of the Department of Philosophy from 1953-1976. This is a public lecture series that presents cutting-edge research by a major philosopher to a wide audience; everyone is encouraged to attend.

Professor Kelly has provided the following abstract for his lecture: It's an election year in the United States, and Americans seem more polarized than ever. In fact, political scientists report that by some measures Americans are more polarized now than at any time since the Civil War. Why is this happening? In this lecture, I apply some of the historical insights and contemporary tools of philosophy to try to gain a better understanding of what we see around us. I conclude by offering some speculations about where we might be headed. A natural idea is that political polarization will get better if people think and act reasonably. Against this, I defend a pessimistic hypothesis: that if people are reasonable, we should expect political polarization to get worse rather than better.

Kelly's main areas of research are epistemology, metaphilosophy and metaethics. Kelly's recent book, Bias: A Philosophical Study, provides a philosophical exploration of bias and the role that it plays in our lives. He develops and defends a norm-theoretic account of bias, according to which objectionable biases involve systematic departures from objective norms or standards of correctness. This book explores the perspectival character of bias attributions, or the ways in which our views about which people and sources of information are biased about a topic are influenced and constrained, both rationally and psychologically, by our views about the topic itself.

Kelly defends a robust pluralism about bias, according to which there is a diversity of biases, with none of these being more fundamental than the rest. A number of radical conclusions are defended: that both rationality and morality sometimes require us to be biased; that in many cases of disagreement, we are rationally required to view those who disagree with us as biased, even if we know nothing about how they arrived at their views or why they hold them; and that even God could not have made us reliable detectors of our own biases through introspection.