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Placement Practice Job Talk—Daniel Munro
Friday December 10, 2021, 1:00 pm - 3:00 pm
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Daniel Munro is a recent graduate from our PhD program and a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Philosophy. Please join us for his practice job talk, which will begin at 1:00 PM sharp. This talk will occur both in person and on Zoom. Plan to log onto Zoom starting at 10 minutes before the hour.
Zoom link: https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/83873432315
Talk Title
Cults, Conspiracies, and Fantasies of Knowledge
Talk Abstract
There’s often pleasure in possessing knowledge, especially in possessing secret knowledge to which outsiders don’t have access. This is part of the allure of groups who seem to have become collectively detached from reality, such as extreme cults and online conspiracy theory groups. I argue that members of such groups often begin by merely fantasizing and pretending they possess secret knowledge, rather than genuinely believing they possess it. However, the dangers of engaging in such fantasies is that they can become mistaken for reality: when they’re vivid enough and engaged in collectively by an entire group, the line between one’s fantasies and one’s beliefs can become blurred.
