Humility, Terror and the Other - Quassim Cassam, Professor of Philosophy (University of Warwick)
Every year the Department of Philosophy hosts the prestigious Michael Lumsden Memorial Lecture. The annual event is in memory of Michael Lumsden, who graduated in Philosophy at Nottingham in 1993 and died shortly thereafter; it is the most important lecture in the department’s calendar. This year's lecture will be given by the University of Warwick's Professor Quassim Cassam. It will be hosted in Humanities A03 at 2pm, on 16th May 2019.
Abstract
Intellectual humility requires a willingness to acknowledge and take ownership of one’s intellectual limitations. These limitations include gaps in one's knowledge. Owning limitations that result from wilful ignorance is false rather than genuine intellectual humility. Other forms of false humility include owning gaps in our knowledge that do not exist or that can easily be closed. In this lecture I will be discussing the role of false humility in the understanding of terrorism. One expression of false humility is the representation of 'new' terrorism as unknowable and beyond rational comprehension. I'll suggest that false humility is a form of 'othering' and that this othering is rooted in what Edward Said describes as the Orientalist myth of the alien and fundamentally irrational Orient.
Professor Quassim Cassam
Quassim has been at Warwick since 2009. Before coming to Warwick he was Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge and Professor of Philosophy at UCL. He was a Professorial Fellow of King's College, Cambridge and has also held Visiting Professorships at the University of California, Berkeley, and Northwestern University. However, most of his career was spent at Oxford, where he read Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) as an undergraduate at Keble College. He went on to do a B.Phil. and then a D.Phil., supervised for the most part by Sir Peter Strawson. His first job in philosophy was at Oriel College, Oxford, as Fellow and Lecturer. He moved to Wadham College, Oxford, in 1986 and spent 18 years there as Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy before my move to UCL.
Since moving to Warwick, Quassim has been Head of Department and President of The Aristotelian Society. He was awarded a Mind Senior Research Fellowship for 2012-13 to enable him to write a book on self-knowledge. The resulting book, Self-Knowledge for Humans, was published by Oxford University Press in 2014. Also published in 2014 was Berkeley's Puzzle: What Does Experience Teach Us?, which he wrote jointly with John Campbell. His previous books were Self and World (1997) and The Possibility of Knowledge (2007).
In 2016, Quassim was awarded a Leadership Fellowship by the Arts and Humanities Research Council for an 18 month project on intellectual vices ('Vice Epistemology'). The resulting book, Vices of the Mind: From the Intellectual to the Political, was published by Oxford University Press in 2019.
Twitter: @QCassam