Miranda Fricker b. 1966

Miranda Fricker is a British philosopher, professor at the City University of New York, and the originator of the influential concept of epistemic injustice. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing distinguished testimonial injustice, in which a speaker is given less credibility than she deserves because of prejudice, from hermeneutical injustice, in which a group lacks the conceptual resources to make sense of its own social experience. Her work has reshaped feminist epistemology, social and political philosophy, and the philosophy of medicine and education, where the concept of epistemic injustice has had wide and practical application.

Miranda Fricker was born in 1966 in Britain. She took her bachelor's at St Anne's College, Oxford, her master's at the University of Sussex, and her doctorate at University College London. She lectured at Heythrop College, at Birkbeck College London for more than a decade, and at the University of Sheffield before joining the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2018, where she is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy; in 2024 she succeeded Tim Williamson as Wilde Reader in Mental Philosophy at the University of Oxford.

Her books include the central Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (2007), Reading Ethics: Selected Texts with Interactive Commentary (2009, with Samuel Guttenplan and Jennifer Hornsby), and the edited collection The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice (2017, with José Medina, Gaile Pohlhaus, and Ian James Kidd).

Fricker introduced the concept of epistemic injustice and distinguished its two principal forms: testimonial injustice, in which prejudice causes a hearer to give less credence to a speaker's word than it deserves, and hermeneutical injustice, in which structural marginalisation deprives a group of the conceptual resources with which to interpret its own social experience. The framework has reorganised analytic epistemology, feminist philosophy, and applied ethics since 2007 and is one of the most consequential single contributions of recent moral philosophy.