Crisis and Judgment

About the course

We live today in an era of what might be described as crisis overload: humanitarian crises, health crises, environmental crises, financial crises, and even epistemic crises (echo chambers, for instance).

The steady stream of disasters (hurricanes, floods, droughts, forest fires) that we have witnessed in the last few decades in particular has inclined some to ask if successful climate change mitigation and democratic decision-making processes are compatible. In the words of a subtitle for a piece in the journal Foreign Policy, "Elected officials work through compromise, but a warming planet waits for no one".

Philosophers such as Hannah Arendt and Ortega y Gasset have emphasised that the difference between a crisis and a catastrophe is precisely that the latter is a consequence of not dealing adequately with the former.

The Ancient Greek verb "krinein" means "to judge or decide". The noun "krisis" means "judgment" or "decision". What makes a crisis "critical" is thus not that it calls for an immediate response, but rather that it entails a judgment in the face of significant uncertainty. In this course, we will study the nature of judgment in contexts where action as well as inaction have potentially cataclysmic and irreversible repercussions. The selected texts provide broad historical perspectives on the themes of the course, where epistemological inquiry draws upon analyses of cultural conditions, developments in science and especially political events in order to examine the anatomy of crises.