Interdisciplinary Fields

The last chapter in Part I examines the boundary work of major communities of practices classified as fields and interdisciplines. New fields arise, Richard McKeon argued, because subject matters are not ready made to respond to all questions, problems, and issues that arise. He called interdisciplinarity an architectonic art of creating new forms and outcomes. The question of where they fit, however, persists. Lynton Caldwell argued the metaphor of fit prejudges the epistemological question at stake. Many fields arose because of a perceived misfit of needs, experiences, information, and structures of disciplinary organization. This chapter identifies patterns and contingencies of specific fields. It begins by describing catalysts, then draws insights from interdisciplinary majors and taxonomies of research and education. It next compares trajectories and outcomes of individual cases. The following sections illustrate trajectories of change and identities, then draws insights from women’s studies and intersectionality. The chapter closes by asking whether there is a distinctive interdisciplinary logic.

Sublime and the quest for Self-actualization in Herman Hesse's Siddhartha

Herman Hesse’s seminal text, Siddhartha is the story about the journey of a man on his path to Self-Actualization. The story deals with the life of the protagonist, Siddhartha, who along with his friend, Govinda embarks on a journey for the search of the authentic Self. Each of them follows a distinct path, leading to vastly different experiences. Siddhartha focuses on the events that happen with the character of Siddhartha and the ways in which they influence and alter him. The book in itself takes the form of a quest and it is only in the end when Siddhartha meets Govinda that he hints at the knowledge that he has acquired. This, however, is not the entirety of his understanding but only a segment of his discovery.The objective of this paper is to underline Siddhartha’s journey of Self-Actualization and to emphasize on his reflections. The paper will try to prove how the journey of Self-actualization in the text is both an ontological and epistemological question. It also tries to describe that sublime moment of understanding which fulfils Siddhartha’s quest of Self-actualization.

A Theory of Contract Law: What Meaning and for What Purpose?

Each of the two parts of Peter Benson’s stimulating book raises an important epistemological question. In the first part, the aim is to search for the “true” theory of contract, the one that best explains the rules and doctrines of general contract law. In the second part, the author seeks to convince that his theory is the best one, in the sense that it is the one that provides the most appropriate moral basis in a liberal democratic society; in other words, the one that allows the greatest “justice” in transactions. A third formidable epistemological question then arises: whether “truth” and “justice” are identical.

Being There

Conrad W. Watson describes fieldwork as ‘a period of particular heightened intensity’ (1999a: 2) in the introduction of Being There (1999b). The authors of this volume were by far not the first, nor the last, anthropologists questioning and critically reflecting on what it is that they are actually doing when being there in their respective fields. For Watson and others (Borneman and Hammoudi 2009; Geertz 2004; Hollan 2008), this was primarily an epistemological question, following ruptures in the discipline’s identity after the Writing Culture Debates of the late 1980s. Forced to rethink their fieldwork practices, anthropologists saw their understandings of theory-building and knowledge production follow suit. However, the complexities and challenges of ethnographic fieldwork also confronted and still confront many anthropologists with intricate questions of inequalities, power structures and violence that not only need to be theorised but also navigated in the everyday practice of fieldwork.

Post-Truth as a Mutation of Epistemology in Journalism

In recent years, many authors have observed that something is happening to the truth, pointing out that, particularly in politics and social communication, there are signs that the idea of truth is losing consideration in media discourse. This is no minor issue: Truth, understood as the criterion for the justification of knowledge, is the essential foundation of enlightened rationality. The aim of this article, based on prior research on social communication (especially as regards journalism), is to elucidate an explanation of this phenomenon, known as ‘post-truth.’ Because it is an epistemological question, the three main variables of the problem (reality, subject and truth) have been analysed by taking into account the manner in which digital social communication is transforming our perception of reality. By way of a conclusion, we propose that (a) the ontological complexity of reality as explained by the news media has accentuated the loss of confidence in journalism as a truth-teller, and that (b) truth is being replaced by sincerity, as an epistemological value, in people’s understanding of the news. The result, using Foucault’s concept of Regime of Truth, suggests a deep change in the global framework of political, economic, social and cultural relations, of which post-truth is a symptom.

‘German Theory’: On Cosmopolitan geographies, counterfactual intellectual histories and the (non)travel of a ‘German Foucault’

In this paper, I propose the notion of ‘German Theory’ to allude to the processes of translation and circulation of theoretical ideas discussed in the German humanities and German geography across and beyond the linguistic boundaries of its origin. However, these ideas did not travel, at least not to Anglophone geography. This paper investigates why not, and it maps out the lost theoretical potential that has been foregone as a result. ‘German Theory’ is thus read here as a potentiality that has not actualised. More specifically, this paper studies the reception of Foucault, as it emerged in two distinct territories of thought, each with their own interpretation: first, Kittler’s work on the materiality of discourse in German humanities, and second, the ‘discourse school’ in German geography. The latter’s insistence on the textuality of discourse disconnected their Foucault reception not only from Kittler’s, but equally so from ongoing debates in Anglophone geography. By reflecting on why the ‘German Foucault’ did not travel to Anglophone geography, I raise a speculative epistemological question about the im/potentiality of ‘German Theory’: could a more cosmopolitan theory have emerged from a circulation of these ideas had they travelled across linguistic boundaries?

Pretense Part I

Three related questions—metaphysical, epistemological, and psychological—about pretense and its relationship to imagination are distinguished. Answers to the metaphysical and epistemological questions are defended in the balance of the chapter. In response to the metaphysical question of what it is to pretend, it’s argued that we need not invoke a sui generis notion of imagination, nor a concept of pretend, in order to say what qualifies someone as pretending. To pretend that x is y is, roughly, to intentionally make some x y-like while believing that x will not, in the process, become a y. Nor, in answer to the epistemological question, need we hold that the recognition of pretense in others requires attributing to them sui generis imaginings, or a primitive mental state concept of PRETEND. Pretense can be recognized—when it is recognizable at all—via superficial features of a person’s behavior.

Teaching "Problematic" Yeats: Relevance Without Recuperation

In the era of #MeToo and #SayHerName, internet “callout culture,”1 Trumpism, Brexit, and an unprecedented global crisis of forced displacement—all abundantly represented in various forms of media—many college students are endlessly tuned-in to the most recent culture wars. Why and how do we teach W. B. Yeats today? I studied Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan” (1924) in college as a poem about myth, centered on an epistemological question: “Did she put on his knowledge with his power[…]?” My students today consider it a “rape poem.” We celebrate the centennial of Yeats’s even-more-famous “The Second Coming” (1919), a poem I studied as a prophetic revision of the Christian apocalypse for the post-World War I moment. My current students worry about Yeats being sacrilegious and exemplifying cultural appropriation with his use of stereotypical imagery of the Middle East. Did I even recognize that the poem was set in the Middle East when I was in college? I have long acknowledged that my students teach me as much as I teach them, and that literature’s power and relevance become evident as it impacts subsequent generations in different ways.

Democracy and values in education. On the epistemological status of experience in pragmatism

The importance of experience in education in the postulates of pragmatism pedagogy is widely known. John Dewey has extensively elaborated on the problem. The purpose of the article is to answer the question about the limits to the use of experience in the process of education. The answer to the question lies in the epistemological question of the relationship between experience and theory. The first section refers to the most important issues relating to the concepts of experience, democracy and values in education. The second section describes the role of experience in pragmatism in the context of behaviorism, social behaviorism in particular. The third section outlines epistemological discussions on the status of experience in knowledge creation. The last section attempts to answer the primary question about the limits to the possible use of experience in the process of education.

Przeczytać znaczy poznać? Filozofi czne aspekty odkrywania dzieła — nie tylko literackiego

TO READ MEANS TO GET TO KNOW? PHILOSOPHICAL ASPECTS OF DISCOVERING A WORK — NOT ONLY A LITERARY WORK An analysis of the act of reading included in philosophers’ writings makes it possible to look for answers to the question about whether we can get to know a book at all? This is an epistemological question, a question about the sources, boundaries and goal of cognition. A question all the more important given the fact that it is asked in an era of a shift from typographic to digital culture. Does getting to know a book consist in reading it? If so then what is this process of reading — getting to know a book? Delving into the author’s intentions or perhaps adding one’s own meanings? Passive acquisition of the content included in the work by its author or active interpretation, assuming that the reader is equally important? To what extent is the meaning of a text fixed, to what extent is its content objective and readable equally to all in every act of reading? Is a book an open work, a separate being with some autonomy or perhaps a text is in all circumstances dependent on its author? Does the author have a monopoly on the “correct” reading of a work? And does a correct/true interpretation exist at all?