Madness and Mental Health: 2023-4

Against Speaking Up: A Defence of Silence

Is it right to assume that speaking our minds is good and keeping silent may be a sign of oppression? Havi Carel and Dan Degerman present this lecture.

We normally take it to be the case that speaking our minds is good and keeping silent may be a sign of oppression. In this talk I suggest that the roles given to speech and silence are more nuanced and context dependent and that an injunction to ‘break the silence’ may be in infringement rather than support of one’s identity, epistemic integrity and confidence.

  • Speakers

    Havi Carel and Dan Degerman

    Havi Carel is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bristol, where she also teaches medical students. She has recently been awarded a £2.6m Wellcome Discovery Award, for a six year project on epistemic injustice in health care (EPIC). Details:
    http://epicproject.info/

    Dan Degerman is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in philosophy at the University of Bristol, where he is currently working on a project about silence and mental health. His first book Political Agency and the Medicalisation of Negative Emotions was recently published by Edinburgh University Press.