Epistemic Crisis Research Articles

Ethical, philosophical, and practical considerations in adherence to therapy in sleep medicine.

We consider a series of linked philosophical issues created by non-adherence to therapy in sleep medicine. First, the difficulty of measuring rates of adherence creates an epistemic problem regarding the efficacy of prescribed treatments. Secondly, as diseases are often classified as refractory based on apparent failure of standard medicines, the validity of this classification faces a similar epistemic crisis. This in turn produces ethical issues when therapies are restricted to cases deemed refractory. It also calls into question, if the patient does not take the medicines as prescribed, what they do with them; and the prospect of potential drug diversion arises. Education of patients seems to be of limited help in addressing these issues; what may be needed is a revision of the patient-prescriber relationship to move away from blame when nonadherence occurs. We close by revisiting an ancient debate in the philosophy of action, which may shed light on what such a revised relationship would require. More honest and trusting patient-physician relationships, and a much more accurate sense of when nonadherence is occurring and why, may result from a better practical and philosophical understanding of the patient's decision-making.

What Would Galileo Think of Ted Cruz? Reflections on Epistemic Crisis and Early Modern Scholarship

What Would Galileo Think of Ted Cruz? Reflections on Epistemic Crisis and Early Modern Scholarship

Postmodernism, science education and the slippery slope to the epistemic crisis

Postmodernism, science education and the slippery slope to the epistemic crisis

Una formación docente en clave antropológica: La antropoformación

Assuming another teacher education, involves risks capable of transforming and transcending the institutional sphere. University education permeated by the epistemic crisis of modernity: the deification of the utilitarian, the predominance of instrumental reason and the fragmentation of knowledge denotes great inadequacies in the face of a transcomplex and uncertain planetary age. Faced with this changing context, teacher training is being harshly criticized in its social activities characterized by its limited action in the face of the growing deterioration of ethical and moral values. The present essay highlights the main results: a) arguments that show that teacher training requires new ontoepistemological architecture. Therefore, the emergence of new conceptual categories is emerging, b) with the objective of configuring teacher training in an anthropological key, in the ethical-political context and emancipatory praxis before the challenges and challenges of the future. c) The findings reflect on the horizon some theoretical approaches to think and feel a teacher training, which will be called anthropoforming. A different look, capable of vindicating the anthropological meaning of teacher training, whose center of interest is in a more ethical, sensitive and humanistic formation that privileges the transformation of social reality, which places a formation of itself, paying attention to of itself.

Think tanks in ‘hard times’ – the Global Financial Crisis and economic advice

ABSTRACTThe Global Financial Crisis of 2008 and the Great Recession that ensued had reverberations that were not only social, political and economic. The crises also led to increased doubt in the value and usefulness of policy expertise and in its producers. This ‘epistemic crisis’ is the starting point of this thematic issue dedicated to think tanks in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis and Great Recession. The Introduction to the issue has four objectives. First, it gives a high-level overview of the challenges and opportunities think tanks have faced in the wake of these crises, given the paradox of growing demand for policy expertise precisely at the moment when such expertise and its makers became suspect for many. Second, the Introduction gives an overview of the research literature on think tanks and their role in the policy-making process and the public debate. Third, the articles comprising this thematic issue are introduced, and connections between them established. Fourth, the introduction gauges the effects of Global Financial Crisis and Great Recession, but also crises more generally, on think tanks and the environment they operate in, and speculates about the future of the think tank industry.

Media, Knowledge and Trust: The Deepening Epistemic Crisis of Democracy

The argument has two related parts: firstly, we are witnessing an “epistemic” crisis in public spheres that threatens to undermine political agency. This crisis has to do with the massive amounts and speed of information, the processes by which we construct knowledge, as well as the new forms of knowledge deriving from digital technologies. Many developments in information technologies benefit democracy, but there is a growing concern about cognitive dilemmas. Secondly, in the present tumultuous juncture of Western democracies, dominated by the populist revolt, traditional distrust of media has turned into an assault on basic Enlightenment premises, eroding shared understandings of reality and compatible discourse. “Knowledge” becomes legitimated via emotionality. Critical rationality and progressive politics must engage more with these developments.

Kawabata and cinema: the ambivalence of knowledge, medium, and influence

Many researchers have considered the involvement of Kawabata Yasunari in cinema and the medium's possible influence on his literature. Such approaches, however, tend to assume a definition of the motion pictures as visuality or montage that then influences Kawabata instead of first considering Kawabata's own conception of cinema, his own film theory. By analyzing his writings on film, including his film criticism, short stories involving cinema, and his involvement in the film A Page of Madness, this paper outlines Kawabata's conception of cinema and argues that he developed a portrait of cinema that posed it as a challenge to identity, perception and knowledge itself. Often associated with the female body, the movies became to Kawabata both an object of fascination and a threat, something ultimately to be controlled through literature and the literary subject. What influenced his literature was then perhaps this perception of cinema as posing an epistemic crisis. It is his ambivalence towards this challenge that can serve as a key for elaborating on Kawabata's complicated location within prewar modernism.

Estéticas curvas para una revolución artístico-feminista

El principal problema que sigue existiendo en los feminismos es la falta de unión que ha derivado de una crisis epistémica y de conocimiento. Esto ha sido trasladado al campo artístico, pero con menores rivalidades, lo que acontece en estos momentos es una reflexión del conocimiento y de las prácticas artísticas culturales, que comienza por cuestionar el todo, para quedarse en un análisis fragmentado, ya que la inclusión gestáltica solo propiciaría un nuevo orden social exclusivo y fijo. Se comienza por el análisis de la estética, cualidad intrínseca al pensamiento humano, después lo humano, concepción historicista basada en una figura hermética y patriarcal, lo histórico, un campo de batalla en el que la mujer ha sido el elemento reproductivo, el espacio público, lugar de encuentro y de generación de conocimiento y así sucesivamente. En esta propuesta se establece una serie de relaciones conceptuales y prácticas que tratan no de eliminar viejos paradigmas culturales, sino más bien tratan de criticar los viejos y promover nuevas relaciones que busquen re-conocer en lo consabido, que se practiquen a sí mismas, lo que Rian Lozano llamó “prácticas culturales anormales”. Para tratar el tema en profundidad y analizar un caso real, se propone como práctica cultural anormal el Festival Internacional de cine feminista, Fem Tour Truck.

Archeology of Epistemic Crisis in Educational Administration

The purpose of the present study is to set up the causes and effects of the epistemic crisis in educational administration. Consistent with this purpose the history of the educational administration was divided into three eras. In the first era, the emergence of educational administration in the USA and the contributions of scholars to the field were evaluated. In the second era, epistemological and methodological bases of the theory movement that assumes logical positivism as the legitimate way of producing knowledge were questioned. In the third era, post-positivist, neo-Marxist and postmodern thinkers’ views that opposed to theory movement in 1970s were considered. At the end of the analysis it was seen that the field failed to develop its authentic conceptual and theoretical tools in the first era. In the second era in which theory movement dominated the field, it was observed that the value domain was excluded in educational administration studies and the field was faced with legitimacy crisis. It was understood that the educational administration was turned to an intellectual battle field in the third era in which the theoretical bases of theory movement were criticized. Based on the analysis it was concluded that the field of educational administration has encountered epistemic crisis since the beginning years and the effects of the crisis has continued till present time.

Storytelling in the Rashomon Gate: Kurosawa, Konjaku monogatari-shu, and Buddhism

This article is concerned with the relationship between Kurosawa Akira’s Rashomon and Konjaku monogatari-shu, an anthology of anecdotes from the Heian period. Kurosawa’s film is adapted from two short stories by Akutagawa Ryunosuke, which are in turn based on three Konjaku tales. This article consists of four parts. In the first part, plot summaries of the three Konjaku tales are provided, and the role of the narrator is examined in each. Special attention is paid to the elements of reflexivity in the commentaries by the Konjaku narrator. The second part of the article investigates the narrative structure of Rashomon and then discusses a striking affinity between the medieval storytelling conventions and the verbal interactions among the three characters in Kurosawa’s frame story. The extensive role of the monk-narrator in Rashomon is analyzed in light of the didactic use of the Konjaku tales in a Buddhist temple in late Heian society. The third section relates Kurosawa’s concern with the enigma of human nature to the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness. The epistemological issues raised in Rashomon are defined as the results of each character’s self-delusion. In cinematizing the interrelated subjects of elusive reality, epistemic crisis, and indeterminacy of meaning, Kurosawa makes brilliant use of his fluid camera. The last section of the article reviews the critical controversy surrounding the foundling sequence and also the problematic association of this episode with Kurosawa’s espousal of Western humanism. Three pieces of evidence are presented to argue that the sequence can be more coherently and meaningfully understood when it is contextualized in the Japanese Buddhist tradition rather than Western humanism.

Sobre o ethos na educação: dialogando com Kohlberg, Habermas e Boaventura de Sousa Santos

O momento civilizatório actual define-se como de crise epistêmica, antropológica, ontológica e ética. Ratificando o espaço educacional como locus privilegiado de constituição de subjetividades, o acento deste estudo recai sobre as concepções de Kohlberg, Habermas e Boaventura de Sousa Santos. As articulações entre filosofia, sociologia e educação iluminam a escola como território de construção subjetiva pela via da interdisciplinaridade. Habermas, em diálogo com a teoria kohlberguiana do julgamento moral, questiona o tecnicismo ao retomar uma ética iluminista cosmopolita emancipatória. Baseando-se na consideração da actualidade como momento de transição paradigmática, Santos posiciona-se contra as perspectivas iluministas antropológica, epistêmica e ética, propondo cartografias da experiência subjectiva que visem à emancipação por um ethos que se norteie pelo senso comum solidário. A discussão entre os autores dar-se-á considerando as relações entre ética e subjectividade no campo da educação, privilegiando os lugares do ensino-aprendizagem e do educador na instituição escolar.

The Epistemic Crisis of African American Studies: A Du Boisian Resolution

This article is concerned with the epistemic and ideological crises in African American Studies. It is grounded in the possibilities emerging from an intersection of Du Boisian historical phenomeno...

Philosophy of Law Against Sovereignty: New Excesses, Old Fragmentations

The only way of entering the world of ‘fragmented law’ (or ‘societal constitutionalism’) is arguably to make normative fragmentation correspond with constituent excess. As Foucault would say, once we are involved in an ‘epistemic crisis’, we must then modify those systems that organise knowledge in conjunction with the very forms that produce it. This contribution considers some privileged forms of critique and reconstruction beyond normative fragmentation and essentially argues in favour of governance dynamics, as well as for ontological devices engaged in the production of subjectivity.

The Grotesque as a Comic Strategy of Subversion. Mapping the Crisis of Masculinity in Patrick McGrath's The Grotesque

Patrick McGrath's novel The Grotesque (1989) provides a paradigm example of how the grotesque may be used to interrogate and ultimately subvert patriarchal notions of masculinity and authority. A working definition of the grotesque is provided by drawing on Peter Fuß’s conceptualization of the grotesque as a ‘chimerical field’, i.e. as rooted in the intersection of diverse aesthetic domains and modes, such as the comic, the uncanny, the fantastic, the absurd and satire. The structural aspects of the grotesque which potentially evoke the mixed emotion of laughter and fear in the recipient are highlighted. The developed theoretical framework serves as a point of reference for the analysis of McGrath's novel, which engages in an explicit dialogue with the complex tradition of the grotesque. The analysis focuses on a detailed reading of how the epistemic crisis staged in the novel is dramatized as a (grotesque) crisis in gender identity. It is argued that the grotesque deformation of the symbolic order and the conflation of gendered dichotomies in the medium of the grotesque (as well as the ridiculing of the ‘manly ideal’ [sensu G. Mosse]) functions as a reader‐activating strategy, calling on us to find alternative models for forging our identity in the postmodern world.

Commentary Where Does the Border Start? Identity, Biculturalism, and the Practice of Anthropology

The last twenty years of anthropology have been ones of doubt and epistemic crisis. We have generally shrunk away from grand theories to explore the specific in all sorts of experimental and diverse ways. But the crisis of representation did not seem to cross over into the appropriation of terms and concepts that became icons of discourse representing other places and their peoples. This is true of the metaphor of the Border, which has served a number of intellectual, political and cultural purposes, none of them particularly helpful to the Border region itself. In this case, Border is not meant metaphorically, but is a very real, and greatly imagined place, the edge of the nation-state.

Discovering the Subject in Renaissance England by Elizabeth Hanson

tRpl/FEWS Elizabeth Hanson. Discovering the Subject in Renaissance Eng­ land. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 190. I have to confess that the circumstances under which I read this book and began the review — a sunny week at a summer cot­ tage — were not exactly suited to its theme or style. It is a highly intelligent book, but not one that you could describe as summer reading (I kept glancing with envy at my wife’s immersion in that lovely highbrow soap-opera A Suitable Boy). Nevertheless, Elizabeth Hanson’s book, which is a contribution to the long­ standing debate on the construction of selfhood in early modern English culture, made a strong impression. Since the publication in 1981 of Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self Fashioning, subjectivity has been a recurrent concern of cultural m aterial­ ist analysis. Under the implicit or explicit surveillance of Michel Foucault, much of the work done in this vein has propounded a simplistic thesis about the production of individual selfhood by regimes of power; or it has sought to describe devious ways by which the semi-autonomous subject escaped the shackles of discursive entrapment. The often fruitless 1980s debate about subversion and containment resulted in an impasse that left most scholars either frustrated or bored. While adopting Fou­ cault’s model of discursive regimes and utilizing his vocabulary of “rupture,” “scandal,” “episteme,” “crisis,” and the like, Han­ son consciously seeks to avoid the kind of totalizing analysis that some earlier commentators have derived from the m aster’s work and to m aintain a resolutely dialectical point of view. Inevitably, both in the way it is written and the intellectual strategies it deploys, the book has a strongly Foucauldian ring, and to some extent reads like a throwback to the late 1980s or early 1990s (its paradigmatic chapter, “Torture and Truth,” was first published in Representations in 1991). But to characterize it thus would be to attend to the book’s superficial rather than substantive features. If one makes the effort required to probe ESC 27, 2001 ESC 27, 2001 below the book’s dense and sometimes irritating surface (I here adopt a metaphor germane to its them e), Hanson’s work reveals itself as always challenging and sometimes brilliant. Hanson’s perspective on the “subject” (she emphasizes the familiar doubleness of the term — its linkage of interiorized sub­ jectivity and political subjection) is centered on practices of in­ vestigation. She is interested in “discovering” as a practice — a technique for probing the subject’s “truth,” a term that she also construes doubly, i.e. both loyalty to the state and what Hamlet calls “the heart of my mystery.” She structures the book around a number of different instances of the discourse and practice of discovering: interrogatory torture, Shakespeare’s “deputy dra­ mas” (Measure for Measure and Othello), rogue literature, and Baconian science. In these disparate arenas she traces a complex pattern of inquisition, outlined first in relation to torture, which impinges on and helps to produce the subjectivity of both the investigator and the one investigated. The assumption is that there is a secret hidden at the core, a secret the victim is bound to protect and the investigator bound to uncover. Torture, which was rarely seen in England before the 1550s or after 1610 and was without foundation in English law, was an administrative procedure allied to the developing practice of criminal investigation during the Elizabethan period. It was carried out mainly against Catholics, and Hanson asks both why it should have emerged when it did and why Catholic re­ sistance, with its emphasis on inner truth, should have been a peculiarly appropriate target (30). Torture’s avowed aim was to discover truth (such was the justification for its practice), but just for this reason it opened up an “epistemic crisis” (56) around the relation of truth to subjectivity. “Truth” played a key role in both “the administrative discourse of judicial in­ vestigation and the religious discourse of conscience” (19), and Hanson stresses how this double role produced “the conceptual interdependence that emerges in torture between two appar­ ently oppositional modes of knowing, the discovery of secrets and the stoic experience of...

Unacceptable Renewals

Unacceptable Renewals

On Empty Compliments and Deceptive Detours

The philosophical question Nunez raises is whether we can have, as he thinks we need, a theoretical grounding for appeal to the intrinsic value of nature. This article examines the neopragmatist reasons for repudiating metaphysical realism's notions of intrinsicality and subject‐independent reality. Following the holism of Donald Davidson and Richard Rorty rather than the epistemological premises of Holmes Rolston and Bernard Lonergan, the author concludes that coping with the ecological crisis does not require conjuring an epistemic crisis. Environmental ethics in neopragmatist hands would seek procedures for bringing about agreement in improving our practices, not our epistemology.

An Affirmative View

Research Article| July 01 1996 An Affirmative View Judith Butler Judith Butler Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Representations (1996) 55: 74–83. https://doi.org/10.2307/3043737 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Judith Butler; An Affirmative View. Representations 1 July 1996; 55 74–83. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/3043737 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRepresentations Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1996 The Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.