Abstract: The talk will explore the nature of smear campaigns geared towards thinkers who commit to public engagements about war as an injustice. The lecture then elaborates on why this type of philosophical engagement provokes large-scale slanders; it grounds abstract anonymous concepts like “human rights” into their geopolitical and historical realities. The talk will further expand on how this abstraction (presented under the term “anonymity") helps and has helped with a comfortable camouflage of expansionism. The second part of the talk inquires whether the continuations of wars are creating new fallacies, with one such potential fallacy examined through concrete and recent examples. The discussion ends by expanding on a few questions that would ideally prompt us to assign greater responsibility for philosophical thinking with respect to war as a form of suffering afar that is fuelled by fallacies and by a loyalty to anonymous and depoliticized concepts.

Dr. Nassim Noroozi is a Visiting Lecturer at Concordia University. She is trained in Philosophy of Education. Her areas of research are ethics of resistance and decolonial philosophy of education. 

Dr. Linda Martín Alcoff will provide commentary via teleconference. Dr. Alcoff is a Latin-American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College, City University of New York. Dr. Alcoff specializes in epistemology, feminism, race theory and existentialism.

Please RSVP to the Students of Philosophy Association's Inclusivity Project Coordinator.