Michael Greer
I work in feminist philosophy, social epistemology, philosophy of social science, and bioethics. My dissertation, which examines the role of emotion in social movement building, pushes on the disciplinary boundaries of philosophy by drawing on qualitative empirical data that I collected myself. My first chapter reflects on the philosophical value of qualitative methods by appealing to the care epistemology developed in Vrinda Dalmiya’s Caring to Know: Comparative Care Ethics, Feminist Epistemology, and the Mahābhārata. I argue that one reason to use qualitative methods in Philosophy is that they allow philosophers to practice a virtue associated with care-knowing, the virtue of relational humility. I contend that practicing this virtue can change how the philosopher feels about uncertainty, her own ignorance, and knowledge in general, and this can have knock-on effects in the knowledge that she produces, ultimately making it more epistemically just. I thus justify the epistemic payoff of qualitative methods in Philosophy in terms of how they allow us to develop ourselves as caring knowers. I am turning this chapter into a series of papers that connect care epistemology with the value of qualitative methods—in the social sciences and philosophy—as well as ideas around how to conduct a more critical, feminist X-Phi.
Kyle Scott
I’m a philosopher working in social and political philosophy. My work primarily concerns the topics of freedom, labor, and capitalism. Currently, I am working on a project on contemporary care work that argues that market pressures increasingly force care workers to perform emotionally engaged labor in ways that are mechanical, instrumentalized, and disconnected from authentic caring motivations. I argue that this produces new forms of alienation that separate workers from the moral and emotional expressions that give their work its distinctive value.