Join the Political Theory Colloquium on Friday, April 13th at 1:30pm in room 1314 Social Sciences tower. Professor Linda Zerilli will present her paper entitled "Toward a Democratic Theory of Judgment."
Professor Zerilli is Charles E. Merriam Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and Faculty Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at the University of Chicago. Her most recent book is Feminism and the Abysss of Freedom (Chicago University Press, 2005).
The Colloquium will be in 1314 Social Sciences. Coffee will be served.
Attached is an event flier and Prof. Zerilli's paper.
Abstract: What would it mean to foreground the capacity to judgecritically and reflectively as a central feature of modern democratic citizenship? This question, raised poignantly albeit not systematically in thework of Hannah Arendt, is of crucial importance for political and feminist theory today. For Arendt, the problem of judgment arises in the wake of the collapse of inherited criteria for judgment or what she called the final breakin tradition brought about by the political catastrophes of the 20th century. For contemporary theorists the problem of how to judge in the absence of these criteria remains an important one. But our focus must be different.The problem is not only the collapse of traditional standards but also how to take account of the plurality of standards that characterize multiethnic and multiracial societies such as the United States and, increasingly, WesternEurope. In this talk I argue that Arendt's turn to Kant's third Critique was a brilliant attempt to rethink how we might expand our understanding of what can so much as count as an object of judgment precisely as a response to this plurality of standards and to shifting multicultural understandings of what can be called political.
