Philip Leverhulme Prize 2023

Philip Leverhulme Prize 2023 recipient Professor Amia Srinivasan will use the Prize to support the research and writing of her monograph, The Contingent World: Genealogy, Epistemology, Politics.

The book is about 'critical genealogies': accounts of the origins of our beliefs, concepts and practices put forward with the purpose of unsettling them. It will examine critical genealogies in their historical, epistemological and political dimensions, and range from ancient Greek thought to contemporary debates about 'identity politics'.

The Contingent World will reconstruct how critical genealogies have been deployed in various intellectual contexts. In turn, this will shed new philosophical light on the deep questions raised by critical genealogy: about the nature of justification, the spectre of scepticism, the sources of normativity, and the relationship between political emancipation and naturalistic explanation.