'If You Are Not a Conspiracy Theorist Then You Are an Idiot'

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• Charles Pigden
• Tuesday 22 October 2013, 17:00-19:00
• Room S1, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, Cambridge, CB3 9DT.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Tamsin Astbury.

An open lecture with Charles Pigden supported by the Leverhulme funded Conspiracy and Democracy Research Project at CRASSH :

‘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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• Room S1, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, Cambridge, CB3 9DT

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