Experiments in Political Economy
Channel: Havens Wright Center for Social Justice
Date: 25/09/2022

A lecture by Elizabeth Anderson utilizing John Dewey's pragmatist framework to critically examine the enslavement of Blacks in the US as a "solution" to "the problem of civilization" as defined by pro-slavery actors of the period.

This event was co-sponsored by Global Studies and the Department of Philosophy at UW-Madison.

Elizabeth Anderson is John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she has taught since 1987. After earning a B.A. at Swarthmore College in 1981 (Philosophy major, Economics minor), she studied under John Rawls at Harvard University, graduating with a Ph.D. in 1987. A Guggenheim Fellow and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Professor Anderson was elected Vice-President of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association in 2013. In 2011 she became inaugural Director of the Program in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, a program she created in collaboration with colleagues in Political Science and Economics. She is the author of Value in Ethics and Economics (Harvard UP, 1993), The Imperative of Integration (Princeton UP, 2010), and numerous articles, widely reprinted, in journals of philosophy, law, and economics.  Her research ranges across several areas, including egalitarianism, democratic theory, anti-discrimination law, pragmatism, value theory, social epistemology, feminist epistemology and philosophy of science, critical race theory, and theories of rationality and social norms.  She is currently working on a history of egalitarianism from the Levelers to the present.