This volume uncovers the colonial epistemologies that 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, this 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.

We speak of the right to know with relative ease. You have the right to know the results of a medical test or to be informed about the collection and use of personal data. But what exactly is the right to know, and who should we trust to safeguard it? This book provides the first comprehensive examination of the right to know and other epistemic rights: rights to goods such as information, knowledge and truth. These rights play a prominent role in our information-centric society and yet they often go unnoticed, disregarded and unprotected. As such, those who control what we know, or think we know, exert an influence on our lives that is often as dangerous as it is imperceptible. Beginning with a rigorous but accessible philosophical account of epistemic rights, Lani Watson examines the harms caused by epistemic rights violations, drawing on case studies across medical, political and legal contexts. She investigates who has the right to what information, who is responsible for the quality and circulation of information and what epistemic duties we have towards each other. This book is essential reading for philosophers, legal theorists and anyone concerned with the protection and promotion of information, knowledge and truth. .

This volume features new perspectives on the implications of cross-linguistic and cultural diversity for epistemology. It brings together philosophers, linguists, and scholars working on knowledge traditions to advance work in epistemology that moves beyond the Anglophone sphere. The first group of chapters provide evidence of cross-linguistic or cultural diversity relevant to epistemology and discuss its possible implications. These essays defend epistemic pluralism based on Sanskrit data as a commitment to pluralism about epistemic stances, analyze the use of two Japanese knowledge verbs in relation to knowledge how, explore the Confucian notion of justification, and surveys cultural differences about the testimonial knowledge. The second group of chapters defends "core monism"-which claims that despite the cross-linguistic diversity of knowledge verbs, there is certain core epistemological meaning shared by all languages-from both a Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) and skeptical perspective. The third cluster of essays considers the implications of cultural diversity for epistemology based on anthropological studies. These chapters explore real disparities in folk epistemology across cultures. Finally, the last two chapters discuss methods or perspectives to unify epistemology despite and based on the diversity of folk intuitions and epistemological concepts. Ethno-Epistemology is an essential resource for philosophers working in epistemology and comparative philosophy, as well as linguists and cultural anthropologists interested in the cultural-linguistic diversity of knowledge traditions.

Drawing ideas from the works of George Herbert Mead, Mikhail Bakhtin, Kenneth Burke, and the American pragmaticism philosophers, Dialogues, Dramas, and Emotions: Essays in Interactionist Sociology argues that the verbal interactions of human agents are characterized by addresses and rejoinders, which Bakhtin called dialogues. These moves conform to what Burke called dramatism. Robert Perinbanayagam uses examples both from dramatic literature and everyday conversations to demonstrate how everyday interactions are inescapably dramas, conducted through the use of dialogues in order to promote mutual understanding. Along with analyzing the dialogues themselves, the author also examines what comes to play in these interactions and shows the various consequences of these emotionalities in ongoing human relationships.

Narrative Naturalism: An Alternative Framework for Philosophy of Mind provides an original framework for a non-reductive approach to mind and philosophical psychology. Jessica Wahman challenges the reductive (i.e., mechanistic and physicalist) assumptions that render the mind-body problem intractable, and claims that George Santayana's naturalism provides a more beneficial epistemological method and ontological framework for thinking about the place of consciousness in the natural world. She uses Santayana's thought as the primary inspiration for her own specific viewpoint, one that draws on a variety of sources, from analytic philosophy of mind to existentialism and psychoanalysis. This outlook, narrative naturalism, depicts sense-making as a kind of storytelling where different narratives serve different purposes, and Wahman offer a unique worldview to accommodate a variety of true expressions about the world, including truths about subjective existence. Motivated by a desire to challenge the reductionist approaches that explain human motivation and experience in terms of neuroscience and by the increasingly pharmacological interpretations of and solutions to psychological problems, Wahman's overarching purpose is to reconstruct the issue so that neuroscience can be embraced as an indispensable story among others in our understanding of the human condition. When placed in this context, neurobiological discoveries better serve the values and practices associated with human self-knowledge and well-being. Narrative Naturalism will appeal to those interested in American philosophy, Santayana scholarship, pragmatist epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophical psychology, and metaphysics.

This book reconstructs the lines of nihilism that Walter Benjamin took from Friedrich Nietzsche that define both his theory of art and the avant-garde, and his approach to political action. It retraces the eccentric route of Benjamin's philosophical discourse in the representation of the modern as a place of "permanent catastrophe", where he attempts to overcome the Nietzschean nihilism through messianic hope. Using conventions from literary criticism this book explores the many sources of Benjamin's thought, demonstrating that behind the materialism which Benjamin incorporates into his Theses on the Concept of History is hidden Nietzsche's nihilism. Mauro Ponzi analyses how Benjamin's Arcades Project uses figures such as Baudelaire, Marx, Aragon, Proust and Blanqui as allegories to explain many aspects of modernity. The author argues that Benjamin uses Baudelaire as a paradigm to emphasize the dark side of the modern era, offering us a key to the interpretation of communicative and cultural trends of today.

Hellenistic philosophy concerns the thought of the Epicureans, Stoics, and Skeptics, the most influential philosophical groups in the era between the death of Alexander the Great (323 BCE) and the defeat of the last Greek stronghold in the ancient world (31 BCE). The Routledge Handbook of Hellenistic Philosophy provides accessible yet rigorous introductions to the theories of knowledge, ethics, and physics belonging to each of the three schools, explores the fascinating ways in which interschool rivalries shaped the philosophies of the era, and offers unique insight into the relevance of Hellenistic views to issues today, such as environmental ethics, consumerism, and bioethics. Eleven countries are represented among the Handbook's 35 authors, whose chapters were written specifically for this volume and are organized thematically into six sections: The people, history, and methods of Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Skepticism. Earlier philosophical influences on Hellenistic thought, such as Aristotle, Socrates, and Presocratics. The soul, perception, and knowledge. God, fate, and the primary principles of nature and the universe. Ethics, political theory, society, and community. Hellenistic philosophy's relevance to contemporary life. Spanning from the ancient past to the present, this Handbook aims to show that Hellenistic philosophy has much to offer all thinking people of the twenty-first century.

The essays in this volume explore some of the disconcerting realities of fanaticism, by analyzing its unique dynamics, and considering how it can be productively confronted. The book features both analytic and continental philosophical approaches to fanaticism. Working at the intersections of epistemology, philosophy of emotions, political philosophy, and philosophy of religion, the contributors address a range of questions related to this increasingly relevant, yet widely neglected topic. What are the distinctive features of fanaticism? What are its causes, motivations, and reasons? In what ways, if at all, is fanaticism epistemically, ethically, and politically problematic? And how can fanaticism be combatted or curtailed? The Philosophy of Fanaticism will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in epistemology, philosophy of religion, philosophy of emotions, moral psychology, and political philosophy.

Scientific thinking must be understood as an activity. The acts of interpretation, representation, and explanation are the cognitive processes by which scientific thinking leads to understanding. This book explores the nature of these processes and describes how scientific thinking can only be grasped from a pragmatic perspective.

First published in 1982, Philosophical Foundations of Probability Theory starts with the uses we make of the concept in everyday life and then examines the rival theories that seek to account for these applications. It offers a critical exposition of the major philosophical theories of probability, with special attention given to the metaphysical and epistemological assumptions and implications of each. The Classical Theory suggests probability is simply the ratio of favorable cases to all equi-possible cases: it is this theory that is relied on by gamblers and by most non-specialists. The A Priori Theory, on the other hand, describes probability as a logical relation between statements based on evidence. The Relative Frequency theories locate it not in logic but among empirical rates of occurrence in the real world, while the Subjectivist Theory identifies probability with the degree of a person's belief in a proposition. Each of these types of theory is examined in turn, and the treatment is unified by the use of running examples and parallel analyses of each theory. The final chapter includes a summary and the author's conclusions. This book is an essential read for scholars and researchers of Philosophy.

Mental action deserves a place among foundational topics in action theory and philosophy of mind. Recent accounts of human agency tend to overlook the role of conscious mental action in our daily lives, while contemporary accounts of the conscious mind often ignore the role of mental action and agency in shaping consciousness. This collection aims to establish the centrality of mental action for discussions of agency and mind. The thirteen original essays provide a wide-ranging vision of the various and nuanced philosophical issues at stake. Among the questions explored by the contributors are: Which aspects of our conscious mental lives are agential? Can mental action be reduced to and explained in terms of non-agential mental states, processes, or events? Must mental action be included among the ontological categories required for understanding and explaining the conscious mind more generally? Does mental action have implications for related topics, such as attention, self-knowledge, self-control, or the mind-body problem? By investigating the nature, scope, and explanation of mental action, the essays presented here aim to demonstrate the significance of conscious mental action for discussions of agency and mind. Mental Action and the Conscious Mind will be of interest to scholars and graduate students working in philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, and philosophy of agency, as well as to philosophically inclined cognitive scientists.

This book examines epistemic pluralism, a brand new area of research in epistemology with dramatic implications for the discipline. Challenging traditional assumptions about the nature of justification, an expert team of contributors explores pluralism about justification, with compelling first-order results - including analysis of the various requisites one might want to impose on the notion of justification (and therefore of knowledge) and why. It is shown why a long-lasting dispute within epistemology about the nature of justification has reached a stalemate and how embracing a different overarching outlook might lead to progress and aid better appreciation of the relationship between the various epistemic projects scholars have been pursuing. With close connections to the idea of epistemic relativism, and with specific applications to various areas of contemporary epistemology (such as the debate over epistemic norms of action and assertion, epistemic peers' disagreement, self-knowledge and the status of philosophical disputes about ontology) this fascinating new volume is essential reading for scholars, researchers and advanced students in the discipline.

This volume features original essays that advance debates on propositional and doxastic justification and explore how these debates shape and are shaped by a range of established and emerging topics in contemporary epistemology. This is the first book-length project devoted to the distinction between propositional and doxastic justification. Notably, the contributors cover the relationship between propositional and doxastic justification and group belief, credence, commitment, suspension, faith, and hope. They also consider state-of-the-art work on knowledge-first approaches to justification, hinge-epistemology, moral and practical reasons for belief, epistemic normativity, and applications of formal epistemology to traditional epistemological disputes. Finally, the contributors promise to reinvigorate old epistemological debates on coherentism, externalism, internalism, and phenomenal conservatism. Propositional and Doxastic Justification will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in epistemology, metaethics, and normativity.

One of the most pervasive and persistent questions in philosophy is the relationship between the natural sciences and traditional philosophical categories such as metaphysics, epistemology and the mind. Contemporary Philosophical Naturalism and Its Implications is a unique and valuable contribution to the literature on this issue. It brings together a remarkable collection of highly regarded experts in the field along with some young theorists providing a fresh perspective. This book is noteworthy for bringing together committed philosophical naturalists (with one notable and provocative exception), thus diverging from the growing trend towards anti-naturalism. The book consists of four sections: the first deals with the metaphysical implications of naturalism, in which two contributors present radically different perspectives. The second attempts to reconcile reasons and forward-looking goals with blind Darwinian natural selection. The third tackles various problems in epistemology, ranging from meaning to natural kinds to concept learning. The final section includes three papers each addressing a specific feature of the human mind: its uniqueness, its representational capacity, and its morality. In this way the book explores the important implications of the post-Darwinian scientific world-view.

This book assesses and defends Kant's Critical epistemology, and the rich yet neglected resources it provides for understanding and resolving fundamental issues regarding human experience, perceptual judgment, empirical knowledge and cognitive sciences. Kenneth Westphal first examines Kant's methods and strategies for examining human sensory-perceptual experience, and then examines Kant's central, proper, and subtle attention to judgment, and so to the humanly possible valid use of concepts and principles to judge particulars we confront. This provides a comprehensive account of Kant's anti-Cartesianism, the integrity of his three principles of causal judgment, and Kant's account of disciminatory perceptual-motor behaviour, including both sensory reafference and perceptual affordances. Westphal then defends the significance of Kant's subtle and illuminating account of causal judgment for three main philosophical domains: history and philosophy of science, theory of action and human freedom, and philosophy of mind. Kant's Critical Epistemology will appeal to researchers and advanced students interested in Kant and the relations of his thought to contemporary philosophical debates and to the sciences of the mind.

This book investigates the central metaphysics and epistemology of Advaita. Although the vastness of Advaita literature has grown to immense proportions, there has been a glaring lacuna in unraveling its philosophical, theological and religious implications. This volume undertakes a thematic search on the conception of Atman in an all-important Advaitic text, the Vivekacudamani , and other supportive texts of the same genre. Walter Menezes aims to revive Advaita as a sound philosophical system by driving away the cloud of negativity associated with it, thereby opening a new chapter in the history of Advaita philosophy.

We take for granted that only certain kind of things exist - electrons but not angels, passports but not nymphs. This is what we understand as 'reality'. But in fact, 'reality' varies with each era of the world, in turn shaping the field of what is possible to do, think and imagine. Our contemporary age has embraced a troubling and painful form of reality: Technic. Under Technic, the foundations of reality begin to crumble, shrinking the field of the possible and freezing our lives in an anguished state of paralysis. Technic and Magic shows that the way out of the present deadlock lies much deeper than debates on politics or economics. By drawing from an array of Northern and Southern sources - spanning from Heidegger, Junger and Stirner's philosophies, through Pessoa's poetry, to Advaita Vedanta, Bhartrhari, Ibn Arabi, Suhrawardi and Mulla Sadra's theosophies - Magic is presented as an alternative system of reality to Technic. While Technic attempts to capture the world through an 'absolute language', Magic centres its reconstruction of the world around the notion of the 'ineffable' that lies at the heart of existence. Technic and Magic is an original philosophical work, and a timely cultural intervention. It disturbs our understanding of the structure of reality, while restoring it in a new form. This is possibly the most radical act: if we wish to change our world, first we have to change the idea of 'reality' that defines it.

Trouble is afoot in Digital Culture and Nerdland. These are, Alexander I. Stingl claims, not the engine of freedom and democracy that they once were hailed to be - this much is already clear in the wake of the snooping and surveillance crises that broke in recent years. Digitalization is but another version of the coloniality of power and being that has been at work for decades and centuries. He poses the question, whether Digital Age possess the legitimacy that 'digitalization' has claimed. His response is critically realistic, but he doesn't stop at a critique for criticism's sake. Inspired by the ideas of decolonial scholars, feminist science studies, current biological and neuro-cognitive research, and sociologists capable of reflection and self-criticism, Stingl attempts to 'break' the canvas of sociology and show that adding a third and decolonial dimension to the two-dimensional sociological imagination is indeed possible. He illustrates that it is possible that class-rooms, free speech on internet, and the inequalities in the production and distribution of a new form of social capital - digital cultural health care capital - can be subjected to a decolonial perspective along a sociological line of inquiry, if sociologists allow for relations with other disciplines and scholarship to be integrative conversations. The goal of this book is not to offer results or closed arguments but to create, instead, platforms for thinking further, opening new lines of inquiry, and to argue that it is not enough to identify problems or to attempt solve the problems with politics or best practice solutions. Instead, he proposes, we must learn to identify and make use of the opportunities that are produced by any problem. Stingl's conclusion is, in short, that a sociology that takes the decolonial challenge and critique seriously, can not be a sociological (sub)discipline or a sociology of (a) problem, but it must be a sociology of opportunities.

By foregrounding successful transnational research projects conducted across Latin America and Europe, this edited collection contests epistemological hegemony and heterogeneity in the academy and highlights feasible models for research cooperation across diverse languages, cultures, and epistemologies. Chapters focus on the practical and theoretical tenets of responsible intra-national research and propose the "Glocacademia" framework as a means of enhancing critical reflection on issues that can inhibit plurilingual, intercultural, and inter-epistemic research. The text offers key recommendations to support institutions and researchers to develop intercultural awareness, multi-level citizenship, and a readiness to embrace diverse knowledge ecologies. The book builds on existing discussions on multiculturalism, interculturality, and transculturality to offer high academic value to the discussion of higher education and research. Offering important contributions to the study of global academic research, this volume will be of interest to scholars and researchers with an interest in international and comparative education, as well as multicultural studies in education research.

We humans are collectively driven by a powerful - yet not fully explained - instinct to understand. We would like to see everything established, proven, laid bare. The more important an issue, the more we desire to see it clarified, stripped of all secrets, all shades of gray. What could be more important than to understand the Universe and ourselves as a part of it? To find a window onto our origin and our destiny? This book examines how far our modern cosmological theories - with their sometimes audacious models, such as inflation, cyclic histories, quantum creation, parallel universes - can take us towards answering these questions. Can such theories lead us to ultimate truths, leaving nothing unexplained? Last, but not least, Heller addresses the thorny problem of why and whether we should expect to find theories with all-encompassing explicative power.

This book is a unique and note-worthy enquiry into the implications of algorithmic knowledge for human subjectivity Eran Fisher provides timely insight on a relevant field of research, i.e., how algorithms impact our society This book will make a timely contribution to the social study of algorithms and will prove especially valuable for scholars working at the intersections of media and communication studies, internet studies, information studies, the sociology of technology, the philosophy of technology, and science and technology studies

This book reveals how the critique of the domination of capitalism inaugurated by the Frankfurt School becomes pluriversal, motivating the historical Critical Theory of Coloniality (CTC) dialogue between the Global South and the Global North. CTC expresses the emergence and historical actuality of a set of intellectual fields aimed at denouncing domination and promoting emancipatory ideas at the borders of colonial capitalism. The book argues that the actuality of the CTC relies on the importance of valuing theoretical and methodological pluralism in the context of the necessary redefinition of the directions of global society. It reveals a plural reflection of scientific, moral, and aesthetic character in different areas of former planetary colonisation such as Asia, Africa, and America but also on the borders of Europe. This book is aimed at researchers and students in the social sciences as well as in interdisciplinary studies. It is attractive to those who are interested in the plural development of theoretical criticism outside the European universe and who seek to understand how capitalist power has metamorphosed with planetary coloniality. Considering this book implies important reflections on topics such as development, modernity, tradition, imperialism, dependency, and democracy, it is interesting to specialists in development issues, international relations, and policymakers.

How does perception give us access to external reality? This book critically engages with John McDowell's conceptualist answer to this question, by offering a new exploration of his views on perception and reality in relation to those of Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl. In six chapters, the book examines these thinkers' respective theories of perception, lucidly describing how they fit within their larger philosophical views on mind and reality. It thereby not only reveals the continuity of a tradition that underlies today's fragmented scholarly landscape, but also yields a new critique of McDowell's conceptualist theory. In doing so, the book contributes to the ongoing bridging of traditions, by combining analytic philosophy, Kantian philosophy, and phenomenology. Perception and Reality in Kant, Husserl, and McDowell will appeal to scholars and students working in the history of philosophy, phenomenology, Kantian philosophy, and in particular the philosophy of perception.

This volume presents a selection of papers from the Poincare Project of the Center for the Philosophy of Science, University of Lisbon, bringing together an international group of scholars with new assessments of Henri Poincare's philosophy of science-both its historical impact on the foundations of science and mathematics, and its relevance to contemporary philosophical inquiry. The work of Poincare (1854-1912) extends over many fields within mathematics and mathematical physics. But his scientific work was inseparable from his groundbreaking philosophical reflections, and the scientific ferment in which he participated was inseparable from the philosophical controversies in which he played a pre-eminent part. The subsequent history of the mathematical sciences was profoundly influenced by Poincare's philosophical analyses of the relations between and among mathematics, logic, and physics, and, more generally, the relations between formal structures and the world of experience. The papers in this collection illuminate Poincare's place within his own historical context as well as the implications of his work for ours."

Religion Within the Limits of Language Alone provides a critical examination of the Wittgensteinian philosophers of religion who claim that the word 'God' cannot be understood as referring to a metaphysical being who may or may not exist. McCutcheon traces the arguments offered by these philosophers of religion back to Wittgenstein's own criticisms of speculative metaphysics, arguing that in its religious usage the concept of God does not fall under Wittgenstein's anti-metaphysical gaze. In presenting a detailed account of Wittgenstein's own philosophical method, including his criticisms of metaphysics, McCutcheon shows that it is possible to accept Wittgenstein's criticisms of metaphysics whilst retaining the metaphysical content of religious language. This book offers a fresh understanding of Wittgenstein's philosophical method and a new critique of religious discourse for those studying philosophy and religious studies.