On Historicizing Epistemology

On Historicizing Epistemology PDF Author: Hans-Jörg Rheinberger
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 080477420X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description
Epistemology, as generally understood by philosophers of science, is rather remote from the history of science and from historical concerns in general. Rheinberger shows that, from the late nineteenth through the late twentieth century, a parallel, alternative discourse sought to come to terms with the rather fundamental experience of the thoroughgoing scientific changes brought on by the revolution in physics. Philosophers of science and historians of science alike contributed their share to what this essay describes as an ongoing quest to historicize epistemology. Historical epistemology, in this sense, is not so concerned with the knowing subject and its mental capacities. Rather, it envisages science as an ongoing cultural endeavor and tries to assess the conditions under which the sciences in all their diversity take shape and change over time.

On Historicizing Epistemology

On Historicizing Epistemology PDF Author: Hans-Jörg Rheinberger
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 080477420X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description
Epistemology, as generally understood by philosophers of science, is rather remote from the history of science and from historical concerns in general. Rheinberger shows that, from the late nineteenth through the late twentieth century, a parallel, alternative discourse sought to come to terms with the rather fundamental experience of the thoroughgoing scientific changes brought on by the revolution in physics. Philosophers of science and historians of science alike contributed their share to what this essay describes as an ongoing quest to historicize epistemology. Historical epistemology, in this sense, is not so concerned with the knowing subject and its mental capacities. Rather, it envisages science as an ongoing cultural endeavor and tries to assess the conditions under which the sciences in all their diversity take shape and change over time.

An Epistemology of the Concrete

An Epistemology of the Concrete PDF Author: Hans-Jörg Rheinberger
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822391333
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
An Epistemology of the Concrete brings together case studies and theoretical reflections on the history and epistemology of the life sciences by Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, one of the world’s foremost philosophers of science. In these essays, he examines the history of experiments, concepts, model organisms, instruments, and the gamut of epistemological, institutional, political, and social factors that determine the actual course of the development of knowledge. Building on ideas from his influential book Toward a History of Epistemic Things, Rheinberger first considers ways of historicizing scientific knowledge, and then explores different configurations of genetic experimentation in the first half of the twentieth century and the interaction between apparatuses, experiments, and concept formation in molecular biology in the second half of the twentieth century. He delves into fundamental epistemological issues bearing on the relationship between instruments and objects of knowledge, laboratory preparations as a special class of epistemic objects, and the note-taking and write-up techniques used in research labs. He takes up topics ranging from the French “historical epistemologists” Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem to the liquid scintillation counter, a radioactivity measuring device that became a crucial tool for molecular biology and biomedicine in the 1960s and 1970s. Throughout An Epistemology of the Concrete, Rheinberger shows how assemblages—historical conjunctures—set the conditions for the emergence of epistemic novelty, and he conveys the fascination of scientific things: those organisms, spaces, apparatuses, and techniques that are transformed by research and that transform research in turn.

Reconsidering Historical Epistemology

Reconsidering Historical Epistemology PDF Author: Matteo Vagelli
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031615557
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description


Political Epistemology

Political Epistemology PDF Author: Pietro Daniel Omodeo
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030231208
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 158

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Book Description
This book is an investigation of the ideological dimensions of the disciplinary discourses on science in line with the scholarly tradition of historical epistemology. It offers a programmatic treatment of the political-epistemological problematic along three entangled lines of inquiry: socio-historical, epistemological and historiographical. The book aims for a meta-level integration of the existing scholarship on the social and cultural history of science in order to consider the ways in which struggles for hegemony have constantly informed scientific discourses. This problematic is of primary relevance for scholars in Science Studies, philosophers, historians and sociologists of science, but would also be relevant for anybody interested in scientific culture and political theory.

The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation

The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation PDF Author: Paul A. Roth
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810140896
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
In The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation, Paul A. Roth resolves disputes persisting since the nineteenth century about the scientific status of history. He does this by showing why historical explanations must take the form of a narrative, making their logic explicit, and revealing how the rational evaluation of narrative explanation becomes possible. Roth situates narrative explanations within a naturalistic framework and develops a nonrealist (irrealist) metaphysics and epistemology of history—arguing that there exists no one fixed past, but many pasts. The book includes a novel reading of Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, showing how it offers a narrative explanation of theory change in science. This book will be of interest to researchers in historiography, philosophy of history, philosophy of science, philosophy of social science, and epistemology.

Epistemic Colonialism and the Transfer of Curriculum Knowledge Across Borders

Epistemic Colonialism and the Transfer of Curriculum Knowledge Across Borders PDF Author: Weili Zhao
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9780367339487
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
This volume uncovers the colonial epistemologies which have long dominated the transfer of curriculum knowledge within and across nation states, and demonstrates how a historical approach to uncovering epistemological colonialism can inform an alternative, relational mode of knowledge transfer and negotiation within curriculum studies research and praxis. World-leaders in the field of curriculum studies adopt a historical lens to map the negotiation, transfer, and confrontation of varied forms of cultural knowledge in curriculum studies and schooling. In doing so, they uniquely contextualize contemporary epistemes as historically embedded and politically produced, and contest the unilateral logics of reason and thought which continue to dominate modern curriculum studies. Contesting the doxa of comparative reason, the politics of knowledge and identity, the making of twenty-first century educational subjects, and multiculturalism, the volume offers a relational onto-epistemic network as an alternative means to dissect and overcome epistemological colonialism. This text will benefit researchers, academics, and educators with an interest in curriculum studies as well as the study of international and comparative education. Those interested in post-colonial discourses and the philosophy of education will also benefit from the volume.

An Introduction to Historical Epistemology

An Introduction to Historical Epistemology PDF Author: Mary Tiles
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
ISBN: 9780631175155
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
This introduction to the theory of knowledge argues for the continuing relevance of philosophical debates about knowledge by connecting them to issues of authority. The discussion takes the form of an essay in historical epistemology which treats the philosopher-politician Frnacis Bacon as its pivotal figure. This affords a non-Cartesian perspective on the transition to modern philosophy from which the distinctive configurations of the Cartesian framework can be discerned. The strategy is to use history as a route to a critical appraisal of "modernism" without embracing post-modernism,Ancient Greek discussions of knowledge from Protagoras to Epicurus via Plato and Aristotle are introduced to illustrate the sense in which modern philosophy broke with ancient tradition while being at the same time conditioned by it. The Baconian vision was of human progress achieved through the acquisition of knowledge which makes domination of nature possible. The tensions inherent in this vision and the way in which they have worked to undermine it are illustrated by refesrence to the views of Kant and Hume and by tracing their consequences.

Elegy for Theory

Elegy for Theory PDF Author: D. N. Rodowick
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674727010
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
Rhetorically charged debates over theory have divided scholars of the humanities for decades. In Elegy for Theory, D. N. Rodowick steps back from well-rehearsed arguments pro and con to assess why theory has become such a deeply contested concept. Far from lobbying for a return to the "high theory" of the 1970s and 1980s, he calls for a vigorous dialogue on what should constitute a new, ethically inflected philosophy of the humanities. Rodowick develops an ambitiously cross-disciplinary critique of theory as an academic discourse, tracing its historical displacements from ancient concepts of theoria through late modern concepts of the aesthetic and into the twentieth century. The genealogy of theory, he argues, is constituted by two main lines of descent—one that goes back to philosophy and the other rooted instead in the history of positivism and the rise of the empirical sciences. Giving literature, philosophy, and aesthetics their due, Rodowick asserts that the mid-twentieth-century rise of theory within the academy cannot be understood apart from the emergence of cinema and visual studies. To ask the question, "What is cinema?" is to also open up in new ways the broader question of what is art. At a moment when university curriculums are everywhere being driven by scientism and market forces, Elegy for Theory advances a rigorous argument for the importance of the arts and humanities as transformative, self-renewing cultural legacies.

The Problem of Disenchantment

The Problem of Disenchantment PDF Author: Egil Asprem
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438469926
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 662

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Book Description
Challenges the conventional view of a “disenchanted” and secular modernity, and recovers the complex relation that exists between science, religion, and esotericism in the modern world. Max Weber famously characterized the ongoing process of intellectualization and rationalization that separates the natural world from the divine (by excluding magic and value from the realm of science, and reason and fact from the realm of religion) as the “disenchantment of the world.” Egil Asprem argues for a conceptual shift in how we view this key narrative of modernity. Instead of a sociohistorical process of disenchantment that produces increasingly rational minds, Asprem maintains that the continued presence of “magic” and “enchantment” in people’s everyday experience of the world created an intellectual problem for those few who were socialized to believe that nature should contain no such incalculable mysteries. Drawing on a wide range of early twentieth-century primary sources from theoretical physics, occultism, embryology, radioactivity, psychical research, and other fields, Asprem casts the intellectual life of high modernity as a synchronic struggle across conspicuously different fields that shared surprisingly similar intellectual problems about value, meaning, and the limits of knowledge. “The Problem of Disenchantment is, in its entirety, extraordinarily well researched, argued, and written—representing at once the most complete and nuanced treatment of the notion of disenchantment within this network of scientific, religious, philosophical, and esoteric discourses and currents.” — Nova Religio

Beyond Disciplinarity

Beyond Disciplinarity PDF Author: Catherine Hayes
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351609874
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 106

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Book Description
This book provides a means of comprehensively grounding and considering the epistemological and philosophical underpinnings of practice-based research epistemologies. By introducing readers to the diverse array of methodological tools and concepts that are necessary to underpin postgraduate research, this book develops an understanding of the distinctions between practice-led research, practice-based research and question-led research, and the contextual significance of each, as well as enabling students to comprehend the historical relationships between academic disciplines and the value of reconnecting them at an epistemological and philosophical level. Through illustrated examples from applied practice across disciplines such as art, social sciences and medical and allied healthcare sciences, readers are encouraged to develop the capacity to not only think conceptually about their own research, but to systematically evaluate that of others. With this focus on descriptive studies from practice, the book fosters higher-order critical thinking in relation to implications for methodological implementation, encouraging deep learning processes and the confidence to transcend the limits of one’s own discipline in order to work collaboratively with researchers in different fields.