A Companion to Public Philosophy

13Philosophy of Protest and Epistemic Activism

JOSÉ MEDINA

The US is home to some of the most powerful protest movements, such as Abolitionism and the Black Freedom Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Movement, the Gay Liberation Movement, and Black Lives Matter. It is also home to some of the most influential philosophers of protest, such as Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and Martin Luther King Jr. And yet a robust philosophy of protest has not flourished in academic circles in the US. A few notable exceptions have been the discussions of protest in moral and political philosophy developed by W.E.B. Du Bois (1903), Bernard Boxill (1976), and, more recently, Chris Lebron (2017), among others; and the recent discussions of protest in applied philosophy of language and political epistemology by Jason Stanley (2017) and myself (Medina 2013, forthcoming a, b), among others. More engagements and collaborations are needed between activists and philosophers for the philosophy of protest to become a vibrant field that connects academic and activist discussions and can energize new generations of publicly engaged philosophers and activists. It is important to think of philosophy of protest not as a field of application of philosophical theories but rather as a field of public engagement in which activists philosophize and philosophers engage in activism.

Doing philosophy of protest, as I conceive it, is doing philosophy both as an activist and as a scholar simultaneously ...