Emily McTernan, "On Taking Offence" (Oxford UP, 2023)
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What is the main focus of the episode and who is the guest?
Welcome to the new books network.
Hello and thanks for joining us for this episode of New Books in Philosophy, which is part of the New Books Network. I'm Robert Talise. I am professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University. I co-host this program with Carrie Figder, Malcolm Keating, and Sarah Tyson. My guest today is Emily McTernan. Emily is Associate Professor of Political Theory at the University College of London. Her research engages questions about host how social norms and how our understanding of them should figure into central debates about justice, equality, civic virtue, and more. Her new book has just been published with Oxford University Press. It's titled On Taking Offense. Now, a lot of ink in moral, political, and legal theory has been spent on trying to define the offensive.
Surprisingly, relatively little attention has been paid to the affectively intoned practice of taking offense One consequence of this Is that a lot of the discussion of offense-taking occurs within the context of popular cultural critique? Where Many critics lament that people are too easily offended or are inclined to take offense at too many things. Now in the book on taking offense, Emily McTernan develops a novel conception of what it is to take offense and why taking offense turns out to be an essential part of our moral and social repertoire. Now as usual. There's lots to talk about. Uh, but also as usual, we'll begin with our guest, the author. Hi, Emily.
Hi, thanks so much for having me on the podcast.
Oh well thank you for uh for joining us. I I you know really enjoyed really, really enjoyed the book and uh I am looking forward to talking to you uh about it.
Great, I'm really looking forward to our discussion.
Fantastic. Um yeah, like I said, we normally begin with a um, you know, by asking the author to to say a few things uh uh about uh about herself. Uh why don't you tell us a bit?
Sure. Um so I guess as a kind of bio note, I was born near London and studied in Cambridge and now I work in London. So I sometimes think that I might be one of the most or the least um mobile members of our profession by chance. As to how I came to philosophy, there's this there's this wonderful story told in my family, it's a real cautionary tale about the sort of problems with universities and the things they teach there. And that's of my granddad's experience of going up to university. So he was from a really working class background and he went to university initially to study PPE, so philosophy, politics and economics. And as the story goes as told in my family, in his first philosophy tutorial, he found the academic who was meant to be teaching him under the desk
um asking him to imagine that the desk wasn't really real and he promptly swapped degree programmes. But I thought that seemed just like such a wonderful moment of teaching and so different from a kind of regimented school classroom of learning stuff and so fantastically impractical. Um so given that and some fantastic philosophy teachers at high school, uh Patrick Moriarty and Victoria Porter, I went off and studied philosophy. Um which my parents were not quite so delighted by. They gave me a gift just before I went to university of a a pinstripe suit. to wear to my first job after the philosophy degree in question. And um it's I think it's a great piece of fortune that I've never had to wear that suit.
Um That's my heart and became a philosopher. Not from a family that particularly thought philosophy was a good thing to do. Um And then after undergraduate, I always intended to become a philosopher of science. So I did my graduate studies in the wonderfully warm and inspiring history and philosophy of science department in Cambridge. Um, but and I still love to teach philosophy of science, but I've ended up as a kind of political philosopher, or perhaps somewhere between a social and political philosopher. Um, because I'm particularly interested in social norms and social practices and how these produce and reproduce injustice. And lately
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main focus of the episode and who is the guest?
0:01–12:03
2
How does Emily McTernan’s personal background shape her interest in taking offense?
12:03–31:58
3
What is the unified, conceptually‑tight account of offense that the book proposes?
31:58–47:31
4
How does taking offense differ from anger, contempt, and other emotions?
47:31–1:00:48
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from New Books in Philosophy
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