The Great Conversation Continues…
WHY Are There Flat Earthers?
Dr. Jeffrey Kaplan
October 19, 2023
5pm in Room 206, Foust Hall
The planet Earth is a sphere. (Technically, it’s an ‘oblate spheroid’.) So why, since 2016, do an increasing number of people believe that it is flat – something known to be false for over two thousand years? The answer is that they are led to this conclusion by a specific theory of knowledge – an extreme version of a view held by 17th and 18th century philosophers, such as John Locke and David Hume. This presentation lays out these theories, explains where they go wrong, and shows what they reveal about our own knowledge of the world.
