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Philosophical practice does not take place in an intellectual or social vacuum, hence it is important to consider how we can improve our social environment when engaging in philosophical reflection. In this paper, I recommend that philosophers of religion seek out epistemic friction, by exposing themselves to viewpoints that are in tension with their own. I first provide an overview of work in experimental philosophy of religion that shows that philosophy of religion presents a distorted epistemic landscape that does not reflect the religious and ideological diversity of human reasoners at large and that privileges particular aspects of Christian theism and scientific naturalism. I respond to two potential objections against the call for increased epistemic friction: epistemic partiality and imaginative resistance. The paper concludes by outlining ways in which philosophers of religion can go outside of their comfort zone and engage more with alternative, under-represented points of view.

This chapter introduces the principles of epistemic friction and freedom, first as general principles of rationality and then as principles of knowledge. Friction and freedom are complementary principles: knowledge without either is impossible. The idea of epistemic friction is traced to Kant, Wittgenstein, and McDowell, but the present conception is different from theirs in several significant ways. The chapter identifies seven subprinciples of friction. Two of these are: (i) all knowledge, empirical and abstract, requires a substantial grounding in both world and mind, and (ii) theorizing in all fields, including philosophy, should be substantive (rather than, e.g., deflationist). Turning to epistemic freedom, the chapter distinguishes various aspects and forms of freedom (e.g., active and passive) and argues that friction and freedom are not mutually exclusive. Norms, for example, are products of freedom but instruments of friction.

This chapter draws on writings by race theorists and pragmatists to inquire into the internal politics of our academic communities. The argument is built around the epistemic injustice articulated by students of colour in my own doctoral programme. The chapter starts with this situation and develops the concept of ‘embodied ignorance’ and its embeddedness in positions of power in order to explain such epistemological injustice and find ways to overcome it. Embodied ignorance arises at the individual level from the limits and particularity of being just one person in space and time and it arises at the social level from the mobilisation of categories of bodies that mark some as more authoritatively, legally and normatively entitled and powerful than others. Greater epistemological justice within the academy cannot easily remedy practical harms, requiring, instead, engagement with the broader society. The chapter examines the history and current practice of affirmative action to better understand the political and economic dimensions of academic exclusion/inclusion. It then turns to pragmatist thought to understand how to go beyond the current limitations imposed on racial and other forms of inclusion in the creation of new knowledge aimed at more democratic ways of knowing and living.