Organized by KLI
(free & open to the public via Zoom)

Topic description / abstract:

Dehumanization (i.e. regarding certain people as not human or as less human) and essentialism are clearly connected, in everyday cognition as well as in the history of those sciences that study humans, and that have, as part of that, often naturalize(d) social inequalities. In the talk, I want to deepen the understanding of how essentialism and dehumanization generally connect (independent of sciences), in order to discuss with the KLI community – on the basis of the talk - how sciences (past and present) stabilize dehumanization.

Biographical note:

Maria Kronfeldner is associate professor at the Central European University in Budapest / Vienna. She works in the philosophy of the life sciences and the philosophy of the social sciences and has published widely in these areas. She has been awarded The Karl Popper Essay Prize of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science and The Philosophical Quarterly International Essay Prize. From 2010-2014 she was Junior Professor at Bielefeld University. Earlier she held several fellowships, among them at the Max Planck Institute for History of Science in Berlin; at the Fishbein Center for History of Science and Medicine of the University of Chicago; at the Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh; and at the Sydney Centre for the Foundations of Science of the University of Sydney. She earned her PhD at the University of Regensburg in 2006.

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