Big Questions, Big Ideas (Adults)

The Ball State Philosophy and Religious Studies Department in partnership with Muncie Public Library presents the Big Questions, Big Ideas series. Learn to think critically about complex issues and questions, and cultivate an awareness of the diversity of ideas in our world.

April's topic will be "Eutopia or Outopia: Ambiguous Utopias as the Normative Force of Critical Theory" by Connor Dull, Philosophy Student, Class of 2025.

To effectively critique capitalist society, theorists must employ an idea of a better society, whether it be implicit or explicit in their argument. This better society is unavoidably a utopia, as it exists only as a possibility or ideal intended to demonstrate the insufficiency of existing social relations. Critical theorists have developed various concepts of this utopian element with the intention of avoiding the naive speculation and totalitarian imposition that utopian methods are often associated with. I argue that this is best accomplished by maintaining that the realizability of our utopian projections is ambiguous; they might be possible, and they might not be. This seemingly benign alteration successfully mediates utopia's ability to inspire radical social change with the need to remain sober and concrete in our analysis of future possibilities.