The David Braybrooke Memorial Lecture in the Austin and Hempel Series
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Weekly Colloquium
SUBJECT: This week’s colloquium
Here are the details about this week’s Philosophy Colloquium. The colloquium will be held from 3:00-5:00 pm (Atlantic time) on Friday, May 16 both in person, in Room 1130 of the Marion McCain Arts and Social Science Building, and online via zoom (details below).
From Tombstone to Timeline:
The Harms of Death and Sharenting
Nicole Ramsoomair (Dalhousie)
This paper critiques Epicurus’s claim that death cannot harm the deceased by arguing that death disrupts the narrative integrity of a person’s life. Posthumous misrepresentations of one’s intentions, actions, and character compromise the coherence of a self-authored identity. Such distortions amount to a form of hermeneutical injustice, wherein dominant interpretive frameworks generate reductive or inaccurate understandings that erode an individual's narrative agency.
This discussion, however, serves only as a conceptual entry point. A comparable and, in some respects, more enduring harm arises through sharenting, the practice by which parents publicly share extensive details of their children’s lives online. Though often regarded as a benign form of digital memory keeping, sharenting can impose externally authored narratives at formative stages of identity development. Virtual and mixed reality environments further complicate these processes by encouraging self-representations that privilege external validation over self-articulation. In both death and sharenting, the individual experiences a loss of epistemic agency in making sense of who they are. Yet unlike the retrospective harm of posthumous misrepresentation, the harm of sharenting unfolds in real time, shaping how the individual comes to live and understand their own life. The child must navigate and internalize a narrative not of their own making, narrowing the space for future agency. When parents, who already shape their children's early self-understanding, curate their children's digital presence, they initiate a narrative trajectory directed by others.
In response to these epistemic harms, this paper argues for a reassessment of ethical responsibilities in digital culture, particularly with respect to children's agency. By examining the conceptual intersections between death, epistemic injustice, and sharenting, the analysis underscores the urgency of safeguarding narrative authenticity in technologically mediated contexts of identity formation.
Zoom:
Dal Philosophy is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Topic: Colloquium
Time: May 16, 2025 03:00 PM Atlantic Time (Canada)
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84856149363?pwd=8rrsEjSjzjDcRTbLIU6NNZbparyuMF.1
Meeting ID: 848 5614 9363
Passcode: 022845
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AFFILIATED GROUPS
- Atlantic Canada Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy
- Minorities and Philosophy
- Dalhousie Women Around Philosophy
- Evolutionary Studies Group
- Animal Studies Group
- The Canadian Philosophical Association - see the CPA's Good Equity Practices
- The Dalhousie Philosophy Equity Committee
DEPARTMENT KUDOS
- Clarisse Paron’s paper, “Eugenic Logics and the Pathologization of Children’s Bodies: Evaluating the American Pediatric Obesity Guidelines for Harmful Scientific and Medical Conduct” is the winner of the 2025 Irving and Jeanne Glovin Award. Congratulations Clarisse!
- Congratulations to Tom Vinci on the eve of publication of his chapter ‘Sensibility and Intellect in Descartes’, to appear in the forthcoming book The Cartesian Mind, Edited By Jorge Secada, Travis Tanner, Cecilia Wee (Routledge, 2026). Tom’s chapter marks 51 years since his first publication in 1971 in the Journal of the History of Philosophy!
- Congratulations to Dr. Erik Nelson (who defended his dissertation last summer) on winning a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship under the supervision of Dr. Kristin Andrews at York University.
- Congratulations to Erik Nelson who defended his PhD dissertation, The Nonlinguistic Mind: Nonlinguistic Concepts, Normativity and Animal Cognition, this June.
- Congratulations to our PhD student, Clarisse Paron, for being awarded the Hadden Prize by the Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science for presenting on of the best two student papers at the Annual Meeting, June 2024. The title of her paper is “Are the New American Pediatric Obesity Guidelines Eugenic? Eugenic Logics and the Medicalization and Pathologization of Children’s Bodies.”
- Congratulations to our PhD students, Lara Millman and Clarisse Paron, for being awarded Dalhousie’s President’s Graduate/Undergraduate Student Teaching Award (2 of 3 available university-wide awards!)
- Congratulations to Dr. Travis LaCroix, who has accepted a position as Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy, Durham University, starting in the fall of 2024.
- Congratulations to Dr. Travis LaCroix, who has been award an Insight Development Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council! Travis’s research project is entitled “Philosophy on the Spectrum: The Philosophy of Autism and Autistic Philosophy.”
- Tyler Hildebrand’s paper “Inductive Reasoning Involving Social Kinds” (with Barrett Emerick) has been published in the Journal of the American Philosophical Association. https://philpapers.org/rec/EMEIRI
- Congratulations to Kayla Beals, who is the 2024 recipient of the F. Hilton Page Memorial Prize, awarded to a graduating student whose thesis is judged to be outstanding.
- Congratulations to George Arnott, who is the 2024 recipient of the Roland Puccetti Memorial Award for the best essay submitted by a student in a 3000- or 4000-level class. George’s essay is entitled "The Virtuous Cohort" Habituation and Character-Friendship as Rational Motivators for Aristotelian Courage.