Epistemic Horizons Research Articles

Power and pedagogic failure: Seeking a politics of empathy towards an anti-racist academy

This article reflects on the challenges of developing anti-racist commitments in a UK university during and ‘post’ pandemic and re-envisions pedagogic failure in this context. Tackling racism requires that our conversations start from a recognition that we are always situated in relationship not just to others but to the structures and cultures of our environments and communities. There are long histories of empathy and its role, risks and limits in intersectional understandings of the transformation of inequalities. We contend that empathy is integral to anti-racist pedagogies because it: centres relationality in critical and reflective learning; has the capacity to be subversive through its challenge to the ‘dominant transmission model of education prevalent in the neoliberal colonial university’; reveals how the university acts upon and works to erase consciousness of our emotional and embodied selves, and has the capacity to unsettle our epistemic horizons to reveal our complicity in colonial practices. Developing a dialogue between the co-authors who worked on a small, funded project on anti-racist learning within a UK Russell Group university in 2022–2023, the article explores the barriers experienced, along with the possibility of constituting ‘generative and fulfilling spaces’.

In Defense of an Account of Degrees of Epistemic Responsibility

This article explores the concept of degrees of epistemic responsibility by examining the debate between Michael Bishop and Katherine Puddifoot on the internalist perspective on epistemic responsibility. While Bishop’s empirical evidence challenges internalism, Puddifoot argues it can be supportive. The author presents an account of degrees of epistemic responsibility, drawing inspiration from Martin Montminy’s idea of moral responsibility. The central argument suggests that an agent is epistemically responsible only if her reasoning strategy aligns with her epistemic abilities, a concept referred to as epistemic par performance. The paper discusses how the Bishop-Puddifoot debate contributes to this perspective, presents Montminy’s view on moral responsibility, and applies it to epistemic responsibility, emphasizing the importance of matching reasoning strategies with individual abilities. The article ultimately highlights the contextual, ability-dependent, and effort-inclusive nature of epistemic responsibility and offers a framework to recognize and credit agents based on their contributions and endeavors in expanding our epistemic horizons. Philosophy and Progress, Vol#73-74; No#1-2; Jan-Dec 2023 P 95-112

Reorientando los lentes para una historia de la teoría del arte en Cuba. ¿Pensamiento cultural en Latinoamérica?

The purpose of this article is to investigate the spaces in which emerges, consolidates and socializes the Cultural Thought of one of the most notable intellectuals of the first half of the Cuban twentieth century. It uses the methodological resources of the New Sociology of Scientific Knowledge, from a critical perspective, to examine the life and work of Jorge Mañach (1898-1961), to corroborate this Cultural Thought’s place as scientific knowledge about art and its contribution to cultural studies within the Latin American epistemic horizon. At the same time, the contingent circumstances that allowed its legitimacy are assessed. In order to visualize Jorge Mañach's cultural thought, special consideration is given not only to the analysis of his most representative theoretical texts, but also to his relationship with the cultural institutions and intellectual initiatives to which he was linked.

‘They silenced our voices’; a genealogy of the linguistic othering of the Kurds in Iran

Since the turn of the twentieth century, the Kurds in Iran have faced various forms of linguistic exclusion. As part of a genealogical project, this article aims to track the lineages of this exclusion. The linguistic exclusions are inscribed in a field of discursivity, which, tracking one of its lineages, turns our attention to the orientalist interventions. The article discusses two complementary projects: the authentication of the Persian language and the othering of the Kurdish language. These projects were made possible by the hegemony of territorial and linguistic discourses over orientalist studies in Iran. Orientalists proposed a periodization of Iranian languages, dividing them into old, middle, and modern eras, with Persian represented as the sole language that has ever existed throughout history, based on their decoding of ancient manuscripts. Meanwhile, the Kurdish language was completely marginalized, and Persian was represented as the essence of all Iranian languages and, consequently, as the language of all Iranians. As a result, an ontological and epistemic horizon emerged, on which all subsequent instances of othering of the Kurds became possible. Finally, the article also examines the ways in which the Kurds have resisted the linguistic exclusions.

Coyote figurations, Techne and Feminism

It is within the framework of situated knowledges in the field of biology and technology studies, in its relation to feminism that the coyote figuration is conceptualized by Donna Haraway. In what respect are they conceived by Donna Haraway to be figures of emancipation? What kind of affinity does it establishes with the figure of cyborg, as figure of posthumanism? Certainly, Donna Haraway hypothesizes the privilege of a ‘partial perspective’ having to play a role in expanding the epistemic horizon of feminist thought. This paper probes into the potential role of coyote figures as metaphors illuminating feminist readings of the relation between philosophy and technology. However, coyote figures have a generic character of transgression, and hence, borders on epistemological reduction of its ontico-ontological phenomenality which Catherine Malabou problematizes. Malabou’s eschewal of flexibility counters this binary by developing the role played by the “fantastic” in the espousal of plasticity of being. Being conceived in this originary mutability eliminates the interior-exterior division of beings. What are the comparable features of coyote figurations and the fantastic? And how does it add to the feminist understanding of philosophy of technology?

Something more beautiful: educational and epistemic integrations beyond inequities in Muslim-minority contexts

PurposeIslamic schools in Western secular societies are evolving in response to collective concerns over marginalization of Muslim children and communities and to increasing demands for high-quality education in the faith tradition. These schools are at the center of public debate over how they fit within secular societies. This paper aims to take a pedagogic look at the literature in the field of Islamic Education Studies.Design/methodology/approachEngaging in a collaborative thematic analytic review of this literature, in an educational hermeneutic approach, two novel themes are discerned as features of Muslim learners’ diverse educational landscapes.FindingsThe first theme, Dual Consciousness recognizes that young Muslims live parallel lives, moving between secular and faith-based schools and communities, and suggesting potential in developing cognitive flexibility across epistemic horizons. The second theme, Educational Transferables is a coalescence of abilities that young Muslims develop within sites of Islamic education, which may enhance their engagement in secular schools and societies.Social implicationsIn highlighting possibilities for young people’s educational well-being in both secular and Islamic schools, with significant pedagogical implications for both, the themes featured in this paper suggest that Muslim learners’ complex educational experiences make varied contributions to heterogeneous societies.Originality/valueDespite ongoing forces of marginalization, expressions of Islamic education have benefits for young Muslims negotiating complex sociocultural and educational worlds. In highlighting possibilities for young people’s educational well-being in both secular and Islamic schools, with significant pedagogical implications for both, these themes suggest that Muslim educators can nurture in young people the ability for complex, conceptual integration in contribution to heterogeneous societies.

Epistemic agency and the generalisation of fear

Fear generalisation is a psychological phenomenon that occurs when fear that is elicited in response to a frightening stimulus spreads to similar or related stimuli. The practical harms of pathological fear generalisation related to trauma are well-documented, but little or no attention has been given so far to its epistemic harms. This paper fills this gap in the literature. It shows how the psychological phenomenon, when it becomes pathological, substantially curbs the epistemic agency of those who experience the fear that generalizes, limiting their ability to respond to evidence, and substantially limiting their epistemic horizons. It is argued that when these epistemic harms are caused by wrongful actions and decisions of individuals or institutions, because the fear is elicited in response to a traumatic experience inflicted by them, the harms should be considered epistemic wrongs. The epistemic wrongs are closely akin to agential epistemic injustice, a variety of distributive epistemic injustice, and sometimes also involve epistemic exclusion. The paper thereby identifies a previously underexplored psychological mechanism that can be a vehicle through which both individuals and institutions can epistemically wrong others. The argument has implications for how both epistemic wrongs and epistemic injustice should be conceived, suggesting that both can occur without being caused by primarily epistemic flaws or errors, or a bad epistemic character. Finally, it highlights the advantage of taking a victim-centred approach to understanding epistemic harm.

Psychiatry is the flagship of personalized and precision medicine: proposing an epistemic horizon to biological psychiatry

“Perhaps the history of errors of mankind, all things considered, is more valuable and interesting than that of their discoveries. Truth is uniform and narrow…but error is endlessly diversified.” — Benjamin Franklin, from the Report of the Royal Commission to Investigate Animal Magnetism ,

What Is a White Epistemology in Psychological Science? A Critical Race-Theoretical Analysis.

Critical race theory guides the analysis of the nature of a white epistemology in psychological science, the consequences for the study of race, and how scientific racism has been possible in the pursuit of knowledge. The article argues that race has not only been misused in the politics of psychology but misappropriated because of the logic of psychological science. The epistemic process is divided into four components to argue that naïve empiricist approaches in psychology, centered on scientific method, prevent an intricate understanding of race. Reasons for privileging method in psychology and the consequences of a white epistemology are discussed, including a narrow epistemic horizon and an inability to account for the temporality and contextuality of psychological phenomena. Ignorance, failure, or unwillingness to account for epistemic complexity when studying race are identified as problems. Questions about who benefits from narrow epistemologies are answered and suggestions for a broader practice of knowledge and education are provided.

Transgression vs the Politically Correct: Phases and Faces of a Core Category in Children’s Literature

It seems that in recent years criticism has been eagerly focusing on ‘transgression’ and ‘transgressive’ as keywords that enlarge the epistemic horizon, allowing the scholar’s gaze to descry areas previously untouched, or explored with a different cultural bias. In the literary domain, as an intentional act that involves trespassing, and the breaking of rules performed in explicit ways, transgression is often linked to language and form, and also to questions of gender, politics, social behaviour. The following articles, while dwelling on transgression, locate it within the area of children’s fiction, thus operating a first preliminary transgression, inasmuch as this kind of literature has been traditionally moulded by the romantic and pastoral fallacy of childhood as an innocent, untainted, happy condition, and, in turn, by the Victorian cult of the child that thrived on aesthetically idealized representations of childhood and youth, teeming with sound moral principles, healthy didacticism, excellent examples of virtue.

Max Weber. Stationen und Impulse einer intellektuellen Biographie by Gangolf Hübinger (review)

Book Reviews 269© Max Weber Studies 2021. Gangolf Hübinger, Max Weber. Stationen und Impulse einer intellektuellen Biographie (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2019), xi + 419 pp. (hbk). ISBN 9783 -16-155724-8. €64.00. Can interpretive sociology interpret itself? In other words: if we apply Weber’s sociological concepts to Weber’s works, what do we get then? Weberforschung never gave a satisfactory answer to that question. The epistemic horizon of a hypothetical Weberian meta-sociology could never be limited to the specific case of its founding father. Succumbing to the idiographic ‘temptation’ would mean, here, to contradict itself. In any case, this paradox seems to have at least one exception. The historical sociology of intellectuals is perhaps the only branch of interpretive sociology in which Weber, so to speak, can become an object of himself. Although the German master did not elaborate a sociology of intellectuals stricto sensu, we find in his work the foundations of a sub-discipline whose importance has only grown in recent decades, and in which Gramsci, Schumpeter, Schelsky, and Bourdieu, to name a few, repeatedly looked to Weber for inspiration. Gangolf Hübinger places his new book on the path opened by this ‘exception’. Despite its title, what the reader has before his eyes is not a biography, but rather a detailed historical-sociological reconstruction. As a member of the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe editorial board and one of the leading interpreters of Weber’s works, Hübinger grounds his approach on Reinhart Koselleck’s classic study on the relationship between great methodological innovations and the experience of pivotal historical transformations.1 It is a matter of re-reading Weber in a perspective that goes far beyond a traditional contextualization in the political and academic spheres. From a systemic and macrohistorical perspective, Weber’s space of experience coincides with what Hübinger considers to be the advent of a new cultural threshold (Kulturschwelle) that has its epicenter in Western Europe at the beginning of the last century (2). A moment in European history characterized by the affirmation of modern capitalism and democracy, by the so-called crisis of historicism, and by the experience of a civilization increasingly exposed to the urban environment, pluralism of worldviews, and conflicts of interests.2 It may be said that a necessary complement to the historical sociology of intellectuals, as Hübinger understands and practices it, is that same cultural history that Weber claimed for himself when The Protestant Ethic 1. Reinhart Koselleck, Zeitschichten. Studien zur Historik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), pp. 27-77. 2. Gangolf Hübinger, ‘Max Weber e a história cultural da modernidade’, Tempo Social 24.1 (2012): 119-36 (121-22). 270 Max Weber Studies© Max Weber Studies 2021. was published. A great connoisseur of the nineteenth-century liberal Protestant milieu that he studied in his Habilitationsschrift, Hübinger situates Weber in dialogue with the literary field of his time (from the brothers Heinrich and Thomas Mann to Robert Musil), with the history of the German publishing houses and large editorial projects, and with the flourishing universe of academic journals. The first part of the book is entitled ‘Bourgeois Conduct of Life and Scientific Orientation’. Hübinger revisits the early stages of Weber’s family and academic socialization as a member of the ‘literate bourgeoisie’ in Germany. His rapid academic ascent was interrupted, as we all know, by the continuous nervous crises that led him to withdraw from teaching in 1903. From that moment on, he became a Privatgelehrter, an ‘private scholar’. For Hübinger, it is precisely this condition that allowed Weber to move freely through fields as far apart from each other as the methodology of the human sciences, German agrarian structure, the genesis of capitalism’s spirit and the liberal revolution in Russia. Yet Weber was not a ‘pure’ type of Privatgelehrter (54). Maintaining an honorary professorship in Heidelberg, he was able to influence the choice of new professors. Most importantly, he participated as coeditor of the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, where he published some of his most important works, and directed the new edition of the Grundriss der Sozialökonomik. His transition from a historical political economy to...

Será que ainda somos cartesianos? Breve excurso sobre a ideia de vida

A interrogação que preside a este ensaio não busca, à maneira heideggeriana, o impensado esquecimento de um certo desenvolvimento historial, mas há de apenas delimitar o estado da arte da visão cartesiana do mundo. Para o efeito, no entanto, não vai além do horizonte epistêmico da Filosofia da Biologia, porque o seu principal objectivo consiste em diagnosticar a “crise de identidade” da Biologia, cujo sucesso experimental não deve camuflar a sua “depressão epistemológica”. Na verdade, trata‑se de uma disciplina que, entre física e metafísica, ainda não encontrou o seu espaço teórico. Ora, é possível remontar tal dificuldade à raiz filosófica da Modernidade. Assim sendo, impõe‑se uma avaliação da mutação paradigmática que Descartes introduz na ordem do saber, de acordo com a qual a investigação racional passa a ter por destino o domínio da Natureza.

Rethinking Alterities from the Starting Point of Posthumanist Revolution

By gradual decentralizations, the nineteenth century has revealed that any technopoietic emergency makes anthropocentric construction proposed by humanists more weightless. Faced with the spectacle of an opening-up world, that reveals few new scenarios and gives a glimpse of some others, we feel excited and confused. Certainly, technological development has released operative energies in human beings, and has made feasible certain operational solutions otherwise unthinkable such as space voyages or the Web. Likewise, it has expanded the epistemic horizon and allowed to go through the darkest entries of the real, implementing few explicative theories that are counterintuitive in many ways. At this point, we should reason about this effect, and try and understand the role of techne, that makes possible the openness of humans to new dimensions of existence. In this report, I will show the epiphanic characteristic of all technopoiesis, capable to indicate a distance between emerging tool and ontological space implemented by this process. Therefore, it is unacceptable a full overlapping among technopoietic outcome, always epiphanic, and tool-in-itself, possibly and scarcely evolutive instead, and anyhow related to a phenomenological here and now. As epiphanic, the technopoietic event is never comforting, nor does it produce any stability or confirmations, but causes chaos, can excite for its tsunami of potentialities only slightly visible; at the same time, it can worry, as it calls a canon into question.

Unpacking the aggregation-oligomerization-fibrillization process of naturally-occurring hIAPP amyloid oligomers isolated directly from sera of children with obesity or diabetes mellitus

The formation of amyloid oligomers and fibrils of the human islet amyloid polypeptide (hIAPP) has been linked with β- cell failure and death which causes the onset, progression, and comorbidities of diabetes. We begin to unpack the aggregation-oligomerization-fibrillization process of these oligomers taken from sera of pediatric patients. The naturally occurring or real hIAPP (not synthetic) amyloid oligomers (RIAO) were successfully isolated, we demonstrated the presence of homo (dodecamers, hexamers, and trimers) and hetero-RIAO, as well as several biophysical characterizations which allow us to learn from the real phenomenon taking place. We found that the aggregation/oligomerization process is active in the sera and showed that it happens very fast. The RIAO can form fibers and react with anti-hIAPP and anti-amyloid oligomers antibodies. Our results opens the epistemic horizon and reveal real differences between the four groups (Controls vs obesity, T1DM or T2DM) accelerating the process of understanding and discovering novel and more efficient prevention, diagnostic, transmission and therapeutic pathways.

RESPONSIBLE RESEARCH AND INNOVATION – A CONCEPTUAL CONTRIBUTION TO THEORY AND PRACTICE OF TECHNOLOGY MANAGEMENT

The concept of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) has become a popular term as a result of making it a cross-cutting theme for the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the European Union. RRI may be understood as a process by which societal actors and innovators become mutually responsive to each other with a view to the acceptability, sustainability and societal desirability of the innovation process and its products. The work presents a review of the state-of-art scientific literature on Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) together with a synthesis of theoretical and practical challenges faced by this new concept. Mapping of RRI dimensions and its theoretical assumptions is performed. Bibliometric analysis of the scientific literature on RRI is carried out. The analysis of RRI-related projects is conducted. The attempt is made to clarify what RRI means for an enterprise in practical terms and what makes an innovation project in an enterprise a responsible one. Finally, a proposal for a closer interchange between RRI and Technology Assessment discourses is made together with an argument for a more extensive use of future-oriented methods that increase epistemic horizons of an innovating organisation.

Vitalism Now – A Problematic

This paper considers whether and how ‘vitalism’ might be considered relevant as a concept today; whether its relevance should be expressed in terms of disciplinary demarcations between the life sciences and the natural sciences; and whether there is a fundamental incompatibility between a ‘vitalism of process’ and a ‘vitalism as pathos’. I argue that the relevance of vitalism as an epistemological and ontological problem concerning the categorical distinction between living and non-living beings must be contextualized historically, and referred exclusively to the epistemic horizon defined by classical physics. In contrast to this, drawing on the philosophies of Canguilhem, Whitehead, and Atlan, I propose an appreciation of the contemporary relevance of vitalism premised on the pathic and indeterminate character of nature as a whole. From this perspective vitalism expresses a politically significant ethos concerning the relationship between life, knowledge, problems and their solutions.

Semiosis and Bio-Mechanism: towards Consilience

In biosemiotics, some oppose the study of sign relations to empirical work on bio-mechanisms. Urging consilience between these views, we show the value of Alain Berthoz’s concept of simplexity. Its heuristic power is to present molecules, cells, organisms and communities as using tricks to self-fabricate by agglomerating ‘simplex’ bio-mechanisms. Their properties enable living systems (including observers) to self-sustain, adapt and, at best, to thrive. But simplexity also empowers agents to engage with their surroundings in novel ways. Life thus not only generates know-how but also social organisation. With languaging, people can act and inhibit: they can also simplexify. As a result, we can see a fruit as ripe, feel when things are awry or behave in ways likely to be judged to be apt. While all living beings make situated use of the historical and the local, humans also bind these with the use of both practices and artifacts. As a result, brains come to emulate what occurs in-between persons and their surroundings. In pursuing the basis for our powers, we focus on inhibition. This simplex trick enables a plant to use dormancy, a bird to learn, and a person to mesh languaging with other aspects of action/perception. Indeed, inhibition enriches human style phenomenology as impersonal resources are used to expand our epistemic horizons. Experience links a self-fabricating body, ancient bio-mechanisms, community-based concerns and epigenetically derived know-how.

Epistemic Horizons and the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics

In-principle restrictions on the amount of information that can be gathered about a system have been proposed as a foundational principle in several recent reconstructions of the formalism of quantum mechanics. However, it seems unclear precisely why one should be thus restricted. We investigate the notion of paradoxical self-reference as a possible origin of such epistemic horizons by means of a fixed-point theorem in Cartesian closed categories due to Lawvere that illuminates and unifies the different perspectives on self-reference.

Considering Freedom of Religion in a Post-Secular Context: Hapless or Hopeful?

The value of freedom of religion as a stand-alone right is being discussed and challenged a great deal today. Freedom of religion is impugned as being impossible to apply, or redundant because it is replaceable by other rights or resting on an outdated special status for religion that is no longer justified. Framing these debates is the context of post-secularism’ that both challenges old frameworks and highlights increasing social and religious diversity. Is freedom of religion a hapless concept in this context or is it still hopeful? This article presents a defence of the value of freedom of religion. It argues essentially that freedom of religion is able both to recognize the epistemic character of religious adherence and its contribution to challenging and enhancing our epistemic horizons, as well as, importantly, to provide a symbolic affirmation to those who have religious convictions. Freedom of religion thus emerges as still hopeful.

Neúspěšné setkání matematiky a chemie: van ‘t Hoffovy a Sachsovy skládací modely

Three-dimensional material models of molecules were used throughout the 19th century, either functioning as a mere representation or opening new epistemic horizons. In this paper, two case studies are examined: the 1875 models of van ‘t Hoff and the 1890 models of Sachse. What is unique in these two case studies is that both models were not only folded, but were also conceptualized mathematically. When viewed in light of the chemical research of that period not only were both of these aspects, considered in their singularity, exceptional, but also taken together may be thought of as a subversion of the way molecules were chemically investigated in the 19th century. Concentrating on this unique shared characteristic in the models of van ‘t Hoff and the models of Sachse, this paper deals with the shifts and displacements between their operational methods and existence: between their technical and epistemological aspects and the fact that they were folded, which was forgotten or simply ignored in the subsequent development of chemistry.