22 Oct 2013 5:00pm - 7:00pm S1, First Floor, Alison Richard Building

Description

If You Are Not A Conspiracy Theorist Then You are an Idiot

a) A conspiracy theory is a theory that explains some event or events as due in
part to a conspiracy, that is, to a secret plan to influence events by partly
secret means.
b) Every historically and politically literate person employs the strategy of
sometimes believing (and sometimes being prepared to believe) conspiracy
theories.
c) Every historically and politically literate person is a conspiracy theorist.
d) The only way not to be a conspiracy theorist is to be historically and
politically illiterate that is to be, in the Greek sense of the word, an idiot.
f) Therefore if you are not a conspiracy theorist then you are an idiot. 

The lecture will be followed by a wine reception.

Charles Pigden, MA (1983)(Cambridge) PhD (1985)(La Trobe), is Director of Philosophy Politics and Economics (PHPE or PPE) at University of Otago. He has edited Russell on Ethics (1999) (winner of the Bertrand Russell Society Book Award for 2000), contributed the chapter on ethics to the Cambridge Companion to Bertrand Russell and written the entry on Russell’s Moral Philosophy for the Stanford Online Encyclopedia of Philosophy

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