Amber Bowen

Research Fellow

 

Project: Edith Stein and the Essence of Intellectual Humility 

My project contributes to the investigation into the nature and value of Intellectual Humility (IH) by drawing critical resources from the phenomenology of Edith Stein. The first part of the project investigates Stein’s phenomenological analysis of empathy in relation to the question of IH as a way to clarify its essential structures. The second part takes Stein’s unique approach to personhood in connection to what she calls “value” as a means of subverting what Foucault identifies as the reduction of knowledge to power. This is significant because it prevents IH from being weaponized against the marginalized without relativizing it as a virtue. The final part of my project offers a contribution to the current discussion on epistemic injustice by exploring, via Stein, the epistemic value of emotion by demonstrating that it has its own kind of rationality. This is important since intellectual arrogance and the weaponization of intellectual humility often come in the form of discrediting the experiences of the marginalized and the oppressed on the grounds of being emotional (and therefore irrational).

Bio: Amber Bowen (PhD University of Aberdeen) is Assistant Professor of Core Studies and Philosophy at Redeemer University (Canada). Her primary area of specialization are phenomenology and the work of Søren Kierkegaard. She has been part of the Widening Horizons in Philosophical Theology project at the University of St. Andrews writing a monograph in consultation with Merold Westphal on philosophical hermeneutics. She has particular interest in collaborative projects between the analytic and continental philosophical traditions.