Postmodern Epistemology Research Articles

On the epistemology of postmodern spirituality

At first glance, the postmodern spiritual �scene� appears �sociologically messy, experiential, multifaceted, ecological, provisional and collective� (Petrolle 2007) and of uncertain epistemic provenance. Here, I ask: can Roland Benedikter�s (2005) conception of postmodern dialectic and spiritual turn, help us understand postmodern spirituality and can it assist in a construction of a postmodern epistemology of spirituality? The current argument constitutes a meta-theoretical exploration of:� Deconstruction and neo-essentialism as representing the significant dialectic in philosophical postmodernism. Deconstruction is presented as an apophatic moment in Western thought about �knowing� and �being� whilst postmodern neo-essentialism, though contextualised by antirealism and ambiguity, palpably suggests itself. � Postmodern trends which derive from the dialectic. � How these epistemic trends influence methodology in the study of spirituality. � How a trans-traditional (anthropological) spirituality might incorporate insights about transformation from a complex of epistemologies in which, theories of �self� abound.In the conclusion an attempt is made to describe how postmodern spirituality expresses itself in society.�

Analyzing Epistemological Considerations Related to Diversity: An Integrative Critical Literature Review of Family Literacy Scholarship

AbstractThe purpose of this review of family literacy scholarship was to examine the epistemologies underlying both family studies and reviews of family literacy studies. We were especially concerned with those epistemological issues related to the cultural, class, racial, gender, ethnic, and linguistic diversity of people served by family literacy programs. Our rationale for focusing on epistemology and diversity was that research on family literacy has often been framed in ways reflective of epistemological views of diversity, including such binaries as ‘strengths and deficits,’ ‘literate and illiterate,’ and ‘home‐school match and mismatch,’ among others. We searched major electronic databases for reviews of family literacy research and then employed bibliographic branching to identify other reviews yielding 273 reviews of which 213 were substantive. We subjected the 213 substantive reviews to an analytic review template to identify the degree to which diversity was addressed and how it was addressed. We conducted citation coding to identify major citations in each review. We then identified a set of comprehensive edited volumes and subjected the introductions, tables of contents, list of contributors, and references to diversity to a critical discourse analysis emphasizing underlying epistemologies. Findings included the dominance of White women scholars in family literacy research, the incorporation of both modernist and postmodernist epistemologies, and the absence of substantive concern with diversity in a majority of family literacy studies. Findings also showed that more recent reviews were less focused on modernist visions of family literacy as a means to address social problems and more focused on relationships between home and school literacies and the diversity of literacy practices found in homes. In addition, we found that recent reviews showed an increased focus on international and transnational contexts as well as literacy within specific local communities. We discuss these findings as reflecting the complex and diverse environments in which family literacy takes place with their multiple goals. We also discuss the importance of making underlying epistemological assumptions visible so that complexities and contradictions can be acknowledged and addressed.

Betting on Ressentiment : Žižek with Nietzsche

Betting on Ressentiment:Žižek with Nietzsche Zahi Zalloua (bio) Nietzsche is not Žižek's philosopher of choice. Žižek has, in passing, expressed his dislike of Nietzsche (2001b), preferring, of course, the masterful thinker of mediation and the dialectic—Hegel. Yet one gets the impression that it is really Nietzsche's celebrated proto-postmodernist status that transforms him into a suspicious philosopher in Žižek's eyes. But what exactly is it about Nietzsche that the postmodernists find so attractive and that Žižek finds so offensive? Is it Nietzsche's playful undermining of truth, his deep skepticism about the philosophical project of defining and understanding the world? Is his doctrine of perspectivism all too amenable to postmodern epistemology? Take for example Foucault's Nietzschean claim that "truth is a thing of this world" (1980, 131). Or as Nietzsche himself puts it: "only that which has no history is definable" (1989, II, 13). On the whole, Žižek finds such a pursuit of endless interpretation politically dubious. Postmodernism, despite its purported iconoclasm, has not weakened capitalism's global hegemony. On the contrary, postmodernism, as Žižek and others have argued,1 has in fact been complicit with the expansion of late capitalism. What is allegedly needed is not postmodern skepticism à la Nietzsche but a more robust mode of critique, one that can effectively break the ideological spell of our contemporary cynical condition. In the following essay, I want to turn to Žižek's limited but nevertheless suggestive use of an "other" Nietzsche in his 2008 book Violence. I will focus in particular on Žižek's appropriation of Nietzsche's well-known notion of ressentiment, evaluating its interpretive function in Žižek's ideological critique of violence. In Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, Žižek proposes nothing short of a reconceptualization of the problematic of violence. What is typically perceived as violence today is what Žižek calls "subjective violence": it is the violence that is "performed by a clearly identifiable agent... [and]... is [End Page 53] seen as a perturbation of the 'normal,' peaceful state of things" (2008, 1-2). As a necessary philosophical supplement to our understanding of violence, Žižek adds "objective violence," which he then divides into, first, "symbolic violence" (the violence of racist rhetoric, for example, or, more generally, language as the hegemonic imposition of a given universe of meaning) and second, "systemic violence" (such as the violence of capitalism—the view of capitalism as a naturalized, oppressive, impersonal, smooth-functioning socio-political reality). "Objective violence is invisible," Žižek maintains, "since it sustains the very zero-level standard against which we perceive something as subjectively violent" (2). A serious account of objective violence would thus not simply complement a critique of subjective violence but demonstrate how a concern for subjective violence, in effect, helps to sustain the existence of this more insidious form of violence. Whereas humanists and liberals typically advocate the cultivation of empathic imaginings, Žižek enjoins his readers to resist the ideological pull of subjective violence: "My underlying premise is that there is something inherently mystifying in a direct confrontation with [violence]: the overpowering horror of violent acts and empathy with the victims inexorably function as a lure which prevents us from thinking" (3-4). To think critically about violence is to think about it obliquely, to look at violence awry, that is, to look at violence from a multiplicity of incommensurable perspectives.2 Žižek puts the notion of Nietzschean ressentiment in the service of this interpretive task. Briefly, to recall, the men of ressentiment, "these cellar rodents full of vengefulness and hatred" (1989, I, 14) as Nietzsche cruelly describes them in On the Genealogy of Morals, are responsible for the slave revolt in morality, for the reversal and perversion of the original meaning of good and bad. They violently imposed on the ancient opposition of good and bad a moral interpretation, creating, in turn, a new mode of valuation: what was previously "good," in a non-moral sense, now becomes "evil" and what was previously "bad" becomes morally "good."3 Žižek locates and makes visible the bitter feeling of ressentiment in today's religious fundamentalists. In...

’n Narratiewe benadering tot die pastoraat: Kritiese opmerkings na aanleiding van die huidige teologiese debat

Theology in the South African context finds itself in turmoil. At the heart of this theological storm lies the diversity among theologians about how the Word of God should be proclaimed in the postmodern era, as postmodernism poses a challenge to all sciences to re-formulate their claims. So far, the pastorate has met this challenge by making use of the so-called narrative approach to therapy. Specific attention to the narrative approach shows that it operates from a postmodernist epistemology where truth becomes relational and socially constructed. The critical question stemming from this, however, is whether pastoral theology can make use of the narrative approach andstill claim theological validity. Pastoral theologians are heeded to proceed with caution during this period of theological turmoil to avoid the pitfalls of either fundamentalism or liberalism.

‘Back Then it Was Legal’: The Epistemological Imbalance in Readings of Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Rape Legislation

The article examines the epistemological imbalance that currently exists in the area of biblical and ancient Near Eastern rape laws. The imbalance reflects a larger development in western intellectual discourse in which we are moving from an empiricist-positivist epistemology to a postmodern epistemology. The former is characteristic of the modern western worldview and assumes objectivity, value neutrality, and universality. It is primarily interested in the historical quest. The latter recognises the contextualised, particularised, and localised nature of all exegetical work, and emphasises the readers’ responsibilities in the meaning-making process. Three sections structure the investigation. The first section examines how empiricist-positivist readings present Deut. 21:10-14 as a law on marriage and not on rape. The second section analyses Deut. 22:22-29, and shows how this biblical passage emerges as adultery laws within the modern paradigm of interpretation. The third section focuses on ancient Near Eastern legislation to demonstrate that the laws address the rapes of women, children and certain kinds of animals when a reader, living in the contemporary global rape culture, searches for rape in the ancient legislative materials. A conclusion acknowledges the current impasse between modern and postmodern epistemologies in reading biblical and ancient Near Eastern legislation and suggests that currently this imbalance cannot be evened out.

Postmodern Epistemology and the Mission of the Church

AbstractA Christian missionary has traditionally been understood as one who stands for and represents truth. Is this a claim that can be defended within the context of postmodern epistemology? According to Derrida, there is an irreducible difference between sign and signified; all historical religions are therefore limited to the realm of the contingent and the deconstructible. Caputo develops this idea further in his understanding of the endlessly translatable trace of the event. One may argue, however, that this understanding of endless translatability reveals a dependence on a traditional concept of reason that ultimately replaces religious authority with the authority of the interpreter. Arguing that a phenomenology of givenness is the relevant strategy against this kind of idolatry, Marion maintains that one has to work from the possibility of revelation as always overflowing its conceptual representation. In a Christian context, this is done through the retelling of the biblical story, particularly as it is celebrated in the liturgy of the Eucharist. The criticism of the idea of a conceptual representation of truth therefore does not imply that truth is not manifest in the work and mission of the Christian church.

The logical status of risk – to burnish or to dull

Presented here is an elaboration of the fundamental features of the meaning of risk. It distinguishes between analytic approaches grounded in realism and postmodern (including constructionist) epistemologies and the presuppositions of each. It argues that attempts to fuse the ontology of risk with epistemological considerations into a common definition is both internally contradictory and a weak foundation for a theoretically justified definition of risk. In place of a fused definition of risk, it re‐affirms a definition risk as a state of the world, independent of percipient actors.

A confusion of tongues between psychoanalysis and philosophy: Is the controversy over drive versus relational theory a philosophical one?

In recent years the controversy over Drive versus Relational models of the psyche has become entangled in a philosophical controversy over epistemology. Some have argued that the Drive model was a relic of an age of positivistic science, while Relational models are a product of a postmodern condition. This paper argues that the controversy need not be a philosophical one, and that Relational views are not, in fact, a product of postmodernism, nor are they necessarily dependent on a postmodern epistemology. Separating the epistemological from the psychological more carefully may help return the debate to its proper, psychoanalytic domain, and perhaps contribute to a more fruitful dialogue across what, at times, seems like an abyss between Relational views and Drive theory.

ANTHROPOLOGY, POLANYI, AND AFROPENTECOSTAL RITUAL: A SCIENTIFIC AND THEOLOGICAL EPISTEMOLOGY OF PARTICIPATION

Abstract.The 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis sponsored both an International Congress of Arts and Sciences aimed at unity of knowledge and an anthropology exhibit of diverse peoples. Jointly these represented a quest for unifying knowledge in a diverse world that was fractured by isolated specializations and segregated peoples. In historical perspective, the Congress's quest for knowledge is overshadowed by Ota Benga who was part of the anthropology exhibit. The 1904 World's Fair can be viewed as a Euro‐American ritual, a global pilgrimage, which sought to celebrate the advances and resolve the challenges of modernity and human diversity. Three years later Afropentecostalism dealt with these same issues with different methods and rituals. This ritual system became the most culturally diverse and fastest growing religious movement of the twentieth century. I suggest that the anthropological method of Frank Hamilton Cushing, the postcritical epistemology of Michael Polanyi, and the Afropente‐costal ritual movement initiated by William J. Seymour are all attempts to develop a postmodern epistemology that is simultaneously constructive, focused on discerning reality, and broad enough to allow for human consciousness and diverse human communities. I explore this confluence of scientific and participatory epistemology through six theses.

POSTMODERN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION: A SHEEP IN WOLF'S CLOTHING?

In public administration, as in many disciplines, “modernism” and the influence of the Enlightenment has been deplored. This criticism comes somewhat late to public administration, though is forcefully used to chastise modern governmental administration for its failure to take on innovations yielding more just and responsive behavior on the part of administrators and their institutions. Particularly, modernism's infatuation with individualism and scientific progress has left a landscape littered with institutionalized racism, misogyny, injustice, and an incredible resistance to change. In recent years, many public administration scholars have turned to postmodernism as a means to undercut the hegemony of the modernist position in the administrative world. While we admire the goals of these authors we must deplore the way in which they have gone about their work. Insufficient appreciation for the origins of postmodernist epistemology has led many of these authors to become just as deplorably modernist as their predecessors. This mistake is to reinvent modernism in a new form, not to use postmodernism as a liberating, transformative device, as they claim to do.

Counselling Psychology training: Implications for ‘Self’

It is widely accepted that Counselling Psychology is underpinned by both Humanist and Post-Modern epistemologies, and that it holds the practitioner’s ‘use of self’ in the service of the therapeutic relationship to be paramount in the therapeutic encounter. Although Humanism and Post-Modernism can both provide theoretical pretexts for the use of self, these stances to knowledge can be experienced as in conflict with each other, and so generate ambiguity and conflict for trainees. The academic (University) contexts of training courses can feed into aspects of these epistemological conflicts in that they uphold individualist-objectivist stances to knowledge/evidence and styles of communication. In this paper psychological literature is drawn upon to explore how trainees are positioned by the discourses of ‘self’ and ‘development’ that are available to them, with particular reference to the discourse of ‘reflective-practice’. The concept of a plural and dialogical self is used to suggest augmenting the manner in which personal and professional development is conducted and assessed.

Positivism ‘vs’ Postmodernism: Does Epistemology Make a Difference?

Since the 1990s, international relations theory (IR) has supposedly been in the grip of a ‘Third Debate’, this time between positivism and postmodernism. While many have cast doubt as to whether this is in fact the case, and others have argued that it is time to move beyond it, it remains true to say that the issue of positivism vs postpositivism has occupied the minds of a number of academic analysts in recent years. This article takes the more radical position of questioning whether this epistemological debate — if, indeed, one accepts that there is one — has any real import in the sense of influencing the empirical research that IR scholars actually conduct. In short, whether one embraces a positivist or a postmodernist epistemology (for example) has little practical effect upon one's empirical findings. By extension, this argument suggests that the emphasis on the philosophical underpinnings of IR, while not necessarily misconceived in and of itself, has thus far not been central to what IR scholars actually do.

Living in the 21st Century: A Gestalt Therapist's Search for a New Paradigm

AbstractThis article is an attempt to connect some of the basic theoretical assumptions of Gestalt theory with the practice of living in the 21st century against a background of seemingly uncontrollable, violent sectarian/tribal conflict. Gestalt theory is located within a postmodern epistemology whose strengths are critically explored, as well as the tendency toward a skepticism that can deteriorate into a nihilistic impotence. A “new” paradigm of community, compatible with Gestalt theory, is suggested: “You are, therefore, I am.” This “new” paradigm arguably has been gathering momentum for at least seventy years. While offering an alternative vision of hope, it also requires a challenging reflection on personal responsibility and a commitment to community.

MAQĀSID AL-SHARĪ A: EPISTEMOLOGY AND HERMENEUTICS OF MUSLIM THEOLOGIES OF HUMAN RIGHTS

AbstractThis essay explores the purposive strategy of modern Islamic legal theory (i.e., based on maqāsid al-sharīa, with public benefit, or maslaha, as the sharī&#0096a's main purpose) and its use in articulating an Islamic theology of human rights. After a synopsis of contemporary research on Islam and human rights, the essay highlights the main issues involved in the twentiethcentury turn to a purposive approach in usūl al-fiqh (Islamic legal theory). The “maqāsidī ” strategy as it is applied to human rights is then monitored in three distinct currents: traditionalists (Muhammad al-Ghaz¯lī and Muhammad 'Amāra); progressive conservatives (Muhammad Talbi, Muhammad al-Mutawakkal, and Rāshid al-Ghannūshī); progressives working with a postmodern epistemology (Ebrahim Moosa and Khaled Abou El Fadl). In conclusion, this move toward ethical objectivism and an epistemological favoring of ethical values over particular formulations of the text could enable a greater number of conservatives and progressives to converge on some of the burning questions of human rights today.

Discovery and Creation within the Counseling Process: Reflections on the Timeless Nature of the Helping Encounter

Discovery and creation are significant elements of experience within the counseling process. These terms can also serve as metaphors for modern and postmodern epistemologies. These dual meanings for discovery and creation are exploited to examine the intersection of counseling and philosophy, particularly in terms of the timeless nature of the helping encounter.

From Tent Meetings and Store-front Healing Rooms to Walmarts and the Internet: Healing Spaces in the United States, the Americas, and the World, 1906–2006

The centennial of the Azusa Street revivals of 1906 provides us with convenient poles for charting shifts in the landscape of Christian spiritual healing practices during the past century. Alongside unprecedented achievements in medical science, nearly 80 percent of Americans report believing that God supernaturally heals people in answer to prayer. Individuals who need healing, even after trying the best medical cures, readily transgress ecclesiastical, physical, and social boundaries in their quest for health and wholeness. The promise of a tangible experience of divine power, moreover, presents an attractive alternative to seekers disillusioned with what they perceive as the callous materialism of medical science and the religious legalism of traditional Christian churches. This essay calls for new narratives of sacred space that map the ways that pentecostal and charismatic healing practices have proliferated, diversified, and sacralized a growing number and variety of physical, social, and linguistic spaces in the past hundred years. At the turn of the twentieth century, modernist epistemological assumptions that privileged reason over experience encouraged fine intellectual distinctions between the sacred and the secular. In esteeming bodily experience as more trustworthy than disembodied doctrine and in resisting linguistic binaries as culturally constructed, postmodern epistemologies have multiplied the number and range of places available to be endowed with sacred meanings. I argue that boundaries between the sacred and the secular are dissolving at the same time that new boundaries are being established, privileging particular places and defining a new relationship among the United States, the Americas, and the world.

Judgements without rules: towards a postmodern ironist concept of research validity

The past decade has seen the gradual emergence of what might be called a postmodern perspective on nursing research. However, the development of a coherent postmodern critique of the modernist position has been hampered by some misunderstandings and misrepresentations of postmodern epistemology by a number of writers, leading to a fractured and distorted view of postmodern nursing research. This paper seeks to distinguish between judgemental relativist and epistemic relativist or ironist positions, and regards the latter as offering the most coherent critique of modernist/(post)positivist nursing research. The writings of poststructuralist philosophers, including Barthes, Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault and Rorty are examined, and a number of criteria for a postmodern ironist concept of research validity or trustworthiness are suggested. Whilst these writers reject the idea of Method as a guarantee of valid research, they nevertheless believe that value judgements can and must be made, and turn to notions of ironism, différance, and the different. Ultimately, the postmodern ironist reader of the research report must make a judgement without criteria, based on her own practical wisdom or 'prudence'.

Michael Peters' Lyotardian Account of Postmodernism and Education: Some epistemic problems and naturalistic solutions

Postmodernism has established a significant hold in educational thought and some of the most important ideas are to be found in the writings of Michael Peters. This paper examines his postmodern stance and use of Lyotard's account of knowledge, and from a naturalist point of view raises a number of objections centred on science as a metanarrative, the unity of the empirical and the evaluative, and reason, truth and the growth of knowledge. It is concluded that postmodern epistemology, unlike naturalism, does not serve education well.

Reflections on the ‘Realist Turn’ in Organization and Management Studies

abstract This paper has three objectives. First, to provide an exposition of the ‘realist turn’ in contemporary organization and management studies. Second, to assess the detailed implications of this incipient ‘realist turn’ for the underlying explanatory principles and practices that should inform organization and management studies as a social scientific field. Third, to evaluate the potential, longer‐term, impact of these explanatory principles and practices in an intellectual context where anti‐realist ontologies and epistemologies have been dominant. This will entail a critique of contemporary approaches that draw on a social constructionist ontology and a postmodernist epistemology. Overall, the paper concludes that the ‘realist turn’ creates a significant intellectual opportunity and space in which the historical sociology of dynamic organizational forms and managerial control regimes can be rediscovered and renewed.

“Back Then It Was Legal” The Epistemological Imbalance in Readings of Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Rape Legislation

ABSTRACT The article examines the epistemological imbalance that currently exists in the area of biblical and ancient Near Eastern rape laws. The imbalance reflects a larger development in western intellectual discourse in which we are moving from an empiricist-positivist epistemology to a postmodern epistemology. The former is characteristic of the modern western worldview and assumes objectivity, value neutrality, and universality. It is primarily interested in the historical quest. The latter recognizes the contextualized, particularized, and localized nature of all exegetical work, and emphasizes the readers' responsibilities in the meaning-making process. Three sections structure the investigation. A first section examines how empiricist-positivist readings present Deut. 21:10–14 as a law on marriage and not on rape. A second section analyzes Deut. 22:22–29, and shows how this biblical passage emerges as adultery laws within the modern paradigm of interpretation. A third section focuses on ancient Ne...