On Thursday, May 27th at 10 am (CET) we hosted CAS SEE Weekly Seminar with Ivan Cerovac, presented by our fellow Marko-Luka Zubčić.

This talk will present Cerovac’s book Epistemic Democracy and Political Legitimacy and explore whether democratic procedures’ ability to produce substantively correct, efficient or just outcomes increases the legitimacy of such political decisions. Addressing both positions that are too epistemic (e.g., epistocracy), as well as those that are not epistemic enough (e.g., pure epistemic proceduralism), the talk will introduce an innovative structure that can be used to bring order to numerous accounts of epistemic democracy. Furthermore, mapping and critically engaging with the main theories of epistemic democracy, the talk will evaluate arguments for different democratic decision-making procedures and address whether (and to what extent) these arguments constitute democracy’s legitimacy-generating potential. 

Ivan Cerovac is a Research Fellow at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Rijeka, Croatia. He holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Trieste, Italy, and writes and teaches on a range of topics in ethics and political philosophy, including political legitimacy, social justice and democratic theory. He is the author of Epistemic Democracy and Political Legitimacy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), and is currently working on the forthcoming John Stuart Mill and Epistemic Democracy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021). 

Watch the CAS SEE Weekly Seminar with Ivan Cerovac: