Shabnam Singla
Central European University, Vienna
In this paper, I aim to answer the question “Why care about positionality of philosophers in the discipline of professional philosophy?”. I make a normative claim that we, the current professional philosophers, ought to care about the positionality of (potential) philosophers. In order to support my claim, I argue that the positionality of a philosopher plays an important role in shaping the philosophy that they do and also the discipline of professional philosophy as a whole. I show this by analysing the influence of positionality on professional philosophy at the three levels which altogether build the discipline of philosophy. The three levels being the following: (i) Who gets to be a professional philosopher?, (ii) How is something philosophised?, and (iii) What gets philosophised?. I will show that positionality affects philosophy hugely on at least these three levels, if not more. Since positionality does impact philosophy as a discipline in these manners, we
ought to care about it in order to do ‘good philosophy’ – where good philosophy is defined as the kinds of philosophy where one does not take things for granted and truly questions their assumptions as well as possible biases. Throughout the paper, I will consider important counterarguments and reply to them.
Chair: Maciej Jarzębski
Time: September 8th, 16:00-16:30
Location: SR 1.005
SOPhiA 2026 