Ordering Knowledge Corneanu, Sorana; Hendriksen, Marieke M. A; Novgorodova, Daria ...
05/2023
Book
As the world struggles to come to grips with the rise of new populisms that call into question the legitimacy of technocratic expertise, the historical understanding of the processes by which the ...characteristically modern modes of meaning-making came into existence has never been so important. Politically-motivated attacks on ‘science’ are difficult to counter in a climate of generalised scepticism for all forms of authority, but cultural historians have an important part to play by offering an adequate historical framing for the terms of the debate. The origins of modernity are routinely associated with the empirical attitudes of the ‘scientific revolution’ and the liberal rationalism of the Enlightenment; but this story tends to be studied either conceptually by historians of science, or politically by cultural historians. For it to make sense as the backdrop to modern debates, the political and epistemological dimensions of the emergence of modernity need to be put more firmly into contact with one another. This book attempts to do so by focusing on the theme of the emergence of disciplinarity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Contemporary theorists use the term “social construction” with the aim of exposing how what's purportedly “natural” is often at least partly social and, more specifically, how this masking of the ...social is politically significant. The chapters in this book draw on insights from feminist and critical race theory to develop the idea that gender and race are positions within a structure of social relations. On this interpretation, the point of saying that gender and race are socially constructed is not to make a causal claim about the origins of our concepts of gender and race, or to take a stand in the nature/nurture debate, but to locate these categories within a realist social ontology. This is politically important, for by theorizing how gender and race fit within different structures of social relations we are better able to identify and combat forms of systematic injustice. The central chapters of the book offer critical social realist accounts of gender and race. These accounts function as case studies for a broader approach that draws upon notions of ideology, practice, and social structure developed through interdisciplinary engagement with research in social science. Ideology, on the proposed view, is a relatively stable set of shared dispositions to respond to the world, often in ways that also shape the world to evoke those very dispositions. This looping of our dispositions through the material world enables the social to appear natural. Additional chapters in the book situate a critical realist approach in relation to philosophical methodology, and to debates in analytic metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of language.
The present study seeks to learn something about the metaphysics of substance in light of four rich but for the most part neglected centuries of philosophy, running from the thirteenth through the ...seventeenth centuries. At no period in the history of philosophy, other than perhaps our own, have metaphysical problems received the sort of sustained attention they received during the later Middle Ages, and never has a whole philosophical tradition come crashing down as quickly and completely as did scholastic philosophy in the seventeenth century. The thirty chapters work through various fundamental metaphysical issues, sometimes focusing more on scholastic thought, sometimes on the seventeenth century. The volume begins with the first challenges to the classical scholasticism of Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas, runs through prominent figures like John Duns Scotus and William Ockham, and ends in the seventeenth century, with the end of the first stage of developments in post‐scholastic philosophy: on the continent, with Descartes and Gassendi, and in England, with Boyle and Locke.
Repenser la nature Angelini, Andrea; Arnaud, Julie; Balzaretti, Ugo ...
04/2023
Book
Dans une période postpandémique, marquée par de multiples crises écologiques, la nécessité de repenser le rapport de l’être humain avec la nature est au centre non seulement de l’actualité politique, ...mais aussi de la réflexion philosophique. Pourtant, la prise en compte de la place de l’humain dans la nature comme de celle de la nature dans l’être humain n’est pas totalement nouvelle au xxie siècle. Ce geste théorique a été l’horizon philosophique commun à trois courants de pensée du début du siècle précédent : le pragmatisme américain, la philosophie de la vie française et l’anthropologie philosophique allemande, dont respectivement John Dewey, Georges Canguilhem et Helmuth Plessner ont été des représentants éminents. En dépit de leurs différences, ces trois auteurs partagent la volonté d’élaborer un naturalisme alternatif, afin de penser l’entrelacement entre nature et culture sans réduire l’une à l’autre. Ainsi, ils ouvrent la possibilité d’une troisième voie entre deux positions symétriques, un naturalisme réductionniste et un antinaturalisme radical, qui manquent tous les deux la relation dynamique qui s’institue entre ces deux pôles. La conviction qui anime les contributions réunies dans ce volume est qu’un détour historique par les pensées de Dewey, Canguilhem et Plessner permet de faire émerger des outils théoriques et critiques féconds pour repenser la nature, outils que la réflexion contemporaine gagnerait à réactiver.
Modern information communication technology eradicates barriers of geographic distances, making the world globally interdependent, but this spatial globalization has not eliminated cultural ...fragmentation. The Two Cultures of C.P. Snow (that of science–technology and that of humanities) are drifting apart even faster than before, and they themselves crumble into increasingly specialized domains. Disintegrated knowledge has become subservient to the competition in technological and economic race leading in the direction chosen not by the reason, intellect, and shared value-based judgement, but rather by the whims of autocratic leaders or fashion controlled by marketers for the purposes of political or economic dominance. If we want to restore the authority of our best available knowledge and democratic values in guiding humanity, first we have to reintegrate scattered domains of human knowledge and values and offer an evolving and diverse vision of common reality unified by sound methodology. This collection of articles responds to the call from the journal Philosophies to build a new, networked world of knowledge with domain specialists from different disciplines interacting and connecting with other knowledge-and-values-producing and knowledge-and-values-consuming communities in an inclusive, extended, contemporary natural–philosophic manner. In this process of synthesis, scientific and philosophical investigations enrich each other—with sciences informing philosophies about the best current knowledge of the world, both natural and human-made—while philosophies scrutinize the ontological, epistemological, and methodological foundations of sciences, providing scientists with questions and conceptual analyses. This is all directed at extending and deepening our existing comprehension of the world, including ourselves, both as humans and as societies, and humankind.
This open access book chronicles the rise of a new scientific paradigm offering novel insights into the age-old enigmas of existence. Over 300 years ago, the human mind discovered the machine code of ...reality: mathematics. By utilizing abstract thought systems, humans began to decode the workings of the cosmos. From this understanding, the current scientific paradigm emerged, ultimately discovering the gift of technology. Today, however, our island of knowledge is surrounded by ever longer shores of ignorance. Science appears to have hit a dead end when confronted with the nature of reality and consciousness. In this fascinating and accessible volume, James Glattfelder explores a radical paradigm shift uncovering the ontology of reality. It is found to be information-theoretic and participatory, yielding a computational and programmable universe.
This open access book explores the gendered reality of learning philosophy at the university level, investigating the ways in which women and minority students become alienated from the social ...practices of a male-dominated field, and examining pedagogical solutions to this problem. It covers the roles and the interactions of the professor and student in the following ways: (1) the historical situation, (2) the affective, social and bodily situation, and (3) the moral situation. This text analyzes women’s passion for philosophy as a quest for truth, as well as their partial alienation from the social practices of philosophy. It demonstrates that recognition, generosity, and care are central ingredients of good learning and teaching experiences. Providing case studies of experimental courses in philosophy, the book discusses a variety of pedagogical approaches that might increase the inclusiveness of a philosophical education: novel and more gender-balanced ways of interpreting the history of philosophy, problem-based learning as a means of emancipating the student from the traditional master–disciple relationship, body awareness practices as a way of challenging the “disembodying” tendencies of philosophy, and a pluralism of methods to address the needs of different kinds of learners. Thanks to these features, the book is particularly useful for philosophy professors at the university level, but it also provides insights for all readers who feel puzzled about the persistent underrepresentation of women in philosophy.
