Western Epistemology Research Articles

Otredad, alteridad y corporeidad

Este artículo se propone desarrollar una reflexión en torno a la Alteridad y Otredad, enmarcada en la teoría de Levinas y aportaciones de Frances Torralba a través de algunas reflexiones en torno a los conceptos de acogida y hospitalidad. Partiendo de las implicaciones de la alteridad desde estas miradas, se analiza la posibilidad de su realización de cara al colonialismo hegemónico impuesto desde la epistemología occidental, lo que desde una lectura de Boaventura de Sousa puede denominarse como Epistemología Hegemónica del Norte Globalizado, y desde la que se plantean zonas del ser-otro humano y zonas del no ser- otro no humano, lugares que problematizan esta relación de alteridad entre el yo-otro de Levinas, puesto que esta nueva dialéctica negativa en donde el otro no se reconoce y se invisibiliza genera dinámicas de marginación y exclusión en donde la manifestación de la singularidad y la construcción de la identidad se dificulta.

Women, Education and Science

The study presented discusses the insertion of women in the sciences and starts from the assumption that Western epistemology is based on the dualism that is hierarchical, since it privileges mind or reason, said to be proper to masculinity, to the detriment of prejudice against the body and matter, which represents femininity. The objective is to analyze gender relations, whose differences have deepened social and, in particular, educational inequality, especially in relation to the insertion of women in the sciences. To fulfill the proposed objective, the methodology used will be the combination of analysis-synthesis and historical-logic methods, conceived in its dialectic unit. Research techniques such as bibliographic and documentary were used, through data provided by international organizations, censuses and national research institutes. The study of this theme is justified for considering it relevant in the current context where much is discussed from the perspective of building a plural society, with gender justice and less inequality. It is worth mentioning that the study proposed here was presented at the meeting of ANPEd - North, in 2016, at the Federal University of Pará. Thus, it is understandable that education for gender relations has been a relevant theme regarding practices oriented to the discussion of prejudice and discrimination against women.

May 1968: Anticolonial Revolution for a Decolonial Future

In this essay I argue May ‘68 was (1) in its way an anticolonial revolution, since it was directed against a President and government that had been imposed on France ten years previously by the colons of Algeria; (2) the visible staging of an epistemological break that has marked the contemporary era in which the grounds of knowledge have been switched from history to the spatialized present, from western epistemology based on the linearity of script to the spatialized iconic mode of the image, from diachronic to synchronic forms of understanding.

Pandemic Disease and Systems Theory. An Ecological View

The fundamental problem that we raise and address in this paper is the problem of understanding our relationship with our afflictions in ways that are uniquely shaped by such afflictions. We capture our need to shifting our attention from our dominant Western epistemology to systems thinking. In this article, we argue that systems theory and thinking reminds us of the pathologies of epistemology that may preclude learning from our relationship with Covid-19. offers us a way to examine the relationship between an uninvited guest like Covid-19 guests and hosts (human beings) particularly in the light of Rumi’s formulation of being human, namely, as being a “guest house”. While we may never get to a place where we invite Covid-19 into our lives, we can at least respect the fact that it will exist in our lives, as afflictions do, and with this awareness we can begin to find ways to co-exist with it, in the same way that we must do with all other creatures and nature on our only home – Mother Earth. opens us to telling a story about our afflictions in ways that are uniquely shaped by such afflictions. In this regard the authors examine several human responses (stories) to Covid-19 within the context of our system that continues to change and evolve. uncovers the need to recover from our state of addiction to a state of sobriety. The state of sobriety returns us to an awareness that we cannot just do one thing because each movement or perturbation necessarily resonates throughout the system. allows us to shift to an ecological rather than a solely political or economic view of Homo Sapiens. This ecological shift moves us into a moral/ethical realm (we use them interchangeably here) whereby humankind learns to abide by another law. It is a law that is itself punctuated by the distinction between control and restraint. The punctuation of this distinction enables us to become more aware of our attempts to establish a unilateral control over that which is multilateral. These attempts will not only fail, but they would also create different, and perhaps more serious problems. This development of another law to abide by, suggests that we surrender ourselves to being governed by the law of restraint.

Indigenous Epistemologies, Worldviews and Theories of Power

The purpose of the study is to understand Indigenous epistemologies of power from the standpoint of Indigenous participants who are originally from or currently living in the Sudbury and Manitoulin Island areas of Ontario, Canada. Indigenous research methods are privileged throughout, and key aspects of grounded theory are woven in to add support. Comparisons between the Indigenous epistemological concept of power and the Western theories of power of mainstream academia are made, as are relevant criticisms of Western epistemology.
 Fifteen Indigenous participants were interviewed. The central category that arose from the data is, relationships. This central category ties the other main categories together which are: language, sacred sources of power, Indigenous women, abuse of power, and knowledge. The findings indicate that there are many forms and manifestations of power which are related to each other. The source of power is in the interrelatedness of everyone to everything else that is known and unknown. Humility, harmony and balanced relationships produce the healthiest and most magnificent manifestations of power.
 The paper argues that understanding more about epistemologies of power will help illuminate a pathway by which Indigenous peoples and Canadians of settler ancestry can better understand one another, creating the shift in these relationships that is required in order to gather large-scale support for reconciliation and for ethical distribution of power resources in Canada.

A [White] Cyborg’s Manifesto: the overwhelmingly Western ideology driving technofeminist theory

‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ is a required reading in many graduate programs to explore technofeminism, transhumanism, and studies of science and technology to explore notions of gender, race, and other minoritized identities. However, in this essay, I note the ways that Haraway’s piece still exacerbates categories of difference, and my own difficulties and critiques of the cyborg identity. I encourage readers to not only consider its importance, but also the limits of the cyborg identity, and how the concept of cyborg itself is fraught with a Western, patriarchal violence that cannot be ignored in the greater context of technology and technological innovation. Although useful in imagining a departure from traditional categories of difference, I inquire as to whether it upholds the very things it purported to dismantle, and explore other scholars’ works in challenging the concept. Ultimately, ‘cyborgs’ are not outside of the politics within which they exist, and must be interpreted in relation to other identity categories without upholding whiteness and Western epistemologies as the center.

Unthinking philosophy: Aimé Césaire, poetry, and the politics of Western knowledge

ABSTRACT Energised by his concern with the place of poetry in and as philosophy, Césaire’s work is engaged in thinking knowledge, a praxis which becomes fundamental to his critique of the ideology of imperialism. The concern with poetry as magical thinking and the question of what it contributes to philosophy, and more particularly, to epistemology, takes on pressing importance in the light of colonialism, whose domination is predicated on the hegemonic disruption and erasure of indigenous knowledges. Through his radical re-evaluation of Western epistemology, Césaire shows that what is at stake in African/diasporic, and indeed planetary, futures, is a radical reframing of the category of philosophy and the possibility of an alternative relation to objects. The issue of coloniality’s imbrication in a Western ontology of objects takes on amplified importance in the light of current capitalist crises, including ecological collapse.

Otredad, alteridad y corporeidad

Este artículo se propone desarrollar una reflexión en torno a la Alteridad y Otredad, enmarcada en la teoría de Levinas y aportaciones de Frances Torralba a través de algunas reflexiones en torno a los conceptos de acogida y hospitalidad. Partiendo de las implicaciones de la alteridad desde estas miradas, se analiza la posibilidad de su realización de cara al colonialismo hegemónico impuesto desde la epistemología occidental, lo que desde una lectura de Boaventura de Sousa puede denominarse como Epistemología Hegemónica del Norte Globalizado, y desde la que se plantean zonas del ser-otro humano y zonas del no ser- otro no humano, lugares que problematizan esta relación de alteridad entre el yo-otro de Levinas, puesto que esta nueva dialéctica negativa en donde el otro no se reconoce y se invisibiliza genera dinámicas de marginación y exclusión en donde la manifestación de la singularidad y la construcción de la identidad se dificulta.

Gazes from the South: The Tchiloli and the Work of René Tavares

Gazes from the South: The Tchiloli and the Work of René Tavares

The African Epistemic Logic of Peacemaking: A Model for Reconciling the Sub-Saharan African Christians and Muslims

It is becoming evident that failure to reconcile African Christians and Muslims is partly due to the misinterpretation of the African epistemology of peace. This work argues that Christian-Muslim peacemaking must be conceived apart from the Western epistemology (thinking pattern) whereby conferences, lectures, chart signing, religious fora, and systematic military strategies are common practices (Pezard and Shurkin, 2015). For Africans, peacemaking involves creating a space where members of a community connect with each other at a deeper level. This paper explores the process of reconciling African Christians and Muslims, not exclusively from a diplomatic tact and religious slant, but from intrinsic cultural constituents like the African ubuntu (Murithi, 2006), Fulbe’s pulaaku (Mogensen, 2000), and the Ethiopian medemer (Esler, 2019) which are entrenched in the notion of kinship. A Fulbe proverb constitutes a tool for illustrating kinship and peace.

Creaturely Right in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

This essay raises the question of creaturely right and its cosmopolitan possibilities in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein by arguing that the novel’s awareness toward the creaturely condition of earthly life allows us to imagine universal hospitality in the most radical sense. Exploring how the novel identifies the creature as the bearer of life and the creator as the sovereign, this essay’s reading opens another way to discuss the question of power and life beyond Foucauldian and Agambenian perspectives on biopolitics. Noting that the Judeo-Christian strain of imagining life given to creatures by the sovereign creator of life has been strangely neglected in current biopolitical discourse, the purpose of this essay is to demonstrate that the notion of creaturely life still persists in Western epistemology at the center of Enlightenment’s secularizing efforts. More importantly, the question of creaturely life and the creator’s sovereign power complicates modern biopolitics, opening another way to locate the epistemological grounds for violence toward life. This essay’s exploration of the creature’s right of life in Frankenstein will hopefully contribute to expanding our dialogue on power and life.

The datafication of the worldview

The goal of this article is twofold. First, it aims at sketching the outlines of material hermeneutics as a three-level analysis of technological artefacts. In the first section, we introduce Erwin Panofsky’s three levels of interpretation of an artwork, and we propose to import this approach in the field of philosophy of technology. Second, the rest of the article focuses on the third level, with a specific attention towards big data and algorithms of artificial intelligence. The thesis is that these new technologies are not only radically transforming our interactions with the world, or our modes of production and consumption, but also our worldview. In the second section, we rely on Panofsky’s Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism to describe the Scholastic “mental habit” or worldview and its principles. In the third section, we confront this worldview with the mechanistic and informationistic worldviews. Our contribution consists in arguing that (1) despite the differences, the Scholastic, mechanistic, and informationistic worldviews are part of the same logical and causal order that dominated Western epistemology, and (2) today we are facing the appearance of a new worldview that we call “data worldview”. Examples from design, architecture, and visualization of knowledge will be set all along the article.

The Absolute Limit of Latinx Writing

In recent years, decoloniality has emerged as a topic of critical inquiry across Latinx writing studies. This article examines the politics and stakes of this scholarship and argues that Latinx writing has reached an impasse in its project to theorize alternatives to Western epistemologies of writing. Drawing from deconstruction and subaltern studies, we propose to think Latinx writing at its “absolute limit.”

Precarity and the stories we tell: Post-truth discourse and Indigenous epistemologies in Thomas King’s The Back of the Turtle

ABSTRACT This article stems from the assumption that the stories emerging from distinct cultural traditions constitute discrete epistemologies that determine how human individuals and societies face ontological vulnerability and precariousness. Focusing on Thomas King’s novel The Back of the Turtle (2014), it examines the differential agency of two interlocking sets of stories and their respective epistemological systems. Consequently, the article is divided in two main parts. The first examines the novel’s rendering of the tensions between the Enlightenment’s investment in the search for empirical truth, and its current alignment with unfettered neo-liberal capitalism and post-truth discourse. The second part reads the novel’s use of ancestral Indigenous stories as a counterpoint to the stories of modern progress underlying western epistemologies. The emerging question is whether Indigenous ways of knowing embedded in ancestral stories may potentially show the way towards an “ecology of knowledges” that lessens precarity and works towards ecological sustainability.

One Indigenous Academic’s Evolution: A Personal Narrative of Native Health Research and Competing Ways of Knowing

Indigenous health research should reflect the needs and benefits of the participants and their community as well as academic and practitioner interests. The research relationship can be viewed as co-constructed by researchers, participants, and communities, but this nature often goes unrecognized because it is confined by the limits of Western epistemology. Dominant Western knowledge systems assume an objective reality or truth that does not support multiple or subjective realities, especially knowledge in which culture or context is important, such as in Indigenous ways of knowing. Alternatives and critiques of the current academic system of research could come from Native conceptualizations and philosophies, such as Indigenous ways of knowing and Indigenous protocols, which are increasingly becoming more prominent both Native and non-Native societies. This paper contains a narrative account by an Indigenous researcher of her personal experience of the significant events of her doctoral research, which examined the narratives of Native Canadian counselors’ understanding of traditional and contemporary mental health and healing. As a result of this narrative, it is understood that research with Indigenous communities requires a different paradigm than has been historically offered by academic researchers. Research methodologies employed in Native contexts must come from Indigenous values and philosophies for a number of important reasons and with consequences that impact both the practice of research itself and the general validity of research results. In conclusion, Indigenous ways of knowing can form a new basis for understanding contemporary health research with Indigenous peoples and contribute to the evolution of Indigenous academics and research methodologies in both Western academic and Native community contexts.

If We Show Them Will They Come? Attitudes of Native American Youth Towards Higher Education

Indigenous health research should reflect the needs and benefits of the participants and their community as well as academic and practitioner interests. The research relationship can be viewed as co-constructed by researchers, participants, and communities, but this nature often goes unrecognized because it is confined by the limits of Western epistemology. Dominant Western knowledge systems assume an objective reality or truth that does not support multiple or subjective realities, especially knowledge in which culture or context is important, such as in Indigenous ways of knowing. Alternatives and critiques of the current academic system of research could come from Native conceptualizations and philosophies, such as Indigenous ways of knowing and Indigenous protocols, which are increasingly becoming more prominent both Native and non-Native societies. This paper contains a narrative account by an Indigenous researcher of her personal experience of the significant events of her doctoral research, which examined the narratives of Native Canadian counselors’ understanding of traditional and contemporary mental health and healing. As a result of this narrative, it is understood that research with Indigenous communities requires a different paradigm than has been historically offered by academic researchers. Research methodologies employed in Native contexts must come from Indigenous values and philosophies for a number of important reasons and with consequences that impact both the practice of research itself and the general validity of research results. In conclusion, Indigenous ways of knowing can form a new basis for understanding contemporary health research with Indigenous peoples and contribute to the evolution of Indigenous academics and research methodologies in both Western academic and Native community contexts.

Keats via Kim Yeong-Nang, or How the Romantics Have Never Been Western

ABSTRACT This essay offers a reading of Keats via the twentieth-century Korean poet Kim Yeong-Nang to mark the diacritical difference of English Romanticism as modern and Western. Kim belonged to a coterie of writers working to modernize Korean poetry under the influence of Western literature. Keats’s aestheticism particularly inspired Kim, for whom Romanticism became a site of reflection about the very meaning of modern literature. Revisiting Keats’s poetry through Kim’s eyes, this essay traces the otherness of Western epistemology recognized by the Korean poet in English Romanticism. Reading the two poets together offers a model for a new literary study of intertextuality, drawing attention to the many transcultural, multilingual, affective connections yet to be discovered in world literature.

Towards a Sustainable and Harmonized Education in the Mapuche Context

The intercultural education in the Mapuche context has been generating many criticisms in the Chilean context. One of the main criticisms is that intercultural education programs have been imposed by the State, but do not respond to the educational needs or requirements of indigenous communities. Moreover, these programs have not been built in collaboration with the indigenous communities themselves. In this sense, a mayor question remains: what is actually meant by “interculturality” by the Mapuche people themselves, as they state that they are already intercultural because they know both their language (mapuzungun) and the official language of Chile (Castilian) and have forcibly accepted the institutionality and western rationality in Chile. In this context, it is worth asking how “interculturality” can contribute to a sustainable development of education in the Mapuche context. Since “sustainable development”, as implemented in “interculturality programs”, has a western epistemic base, it tends to lead to a homogenization of the knowledge and its further development. Therefore, if we want to think of education for sustainable development in a hypothetical and ideal way, then we should establish a broader or expanded epistemology that covers both language and action of indigenous epistemologies such as “balance” and “harmony” with the land, the rivers, the lakes, the forests, the people, the peoples and the cosmos; we observe that parts of the western epistemologies are aligning to that “balance” with the aim to valorise and recognize the importance of life in “community”. Thus, from the above, there emerges the need to rescue territorial and sociocultural components, which show epistemic and epistemological categories, from both western and indigenous rationalities, in order to generate an education in the framework of “sustainable development”, which can establish a dialogue of educational knowledge between the indigenous and the Chilean western context.

The Incommensurable and the Visible: Gaetano Chiurazzi’s Ontology of Incommensurability and Merleau-Ponty’s Theory of Perception

In Dynamis. Ontologia dell’incommensurabile, Gaetano Chiurazzi offers an account of the philosophical sense and implications of the discovery of incommensurable magnitudes in ancient thought. In his study, Chiurazzi presents the scope of the idea of incommensurability in contrast to those theories that have interpreted perception as the primary access to reality. Chiurazzi claims that the discovery of incommensurable relations, such as that of “1/square root of 2,” which expresses the relation between the side and the diagonal of a square, introduces the conception of asymmetrical relations into Western epistemology and ontology. This conception finds in the modern idea of transcendental philosophy its mature formulation. In this paper, I draw on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s proposal of a phenomenology of perception in order to critically evaluate the working assumption in Chiurazzi’s account that perception is the faculty of intuition that seizes upon the individual and therefore as “atomic” in nature.

Epistemologi Dalam Filsafat Barat

Abstract: The presence of epistemology in western philosophy is very influential in life, especially in regulating the strategy of power or power to achieve goals. The style of western thought brought a big change in the knowledge of thinking, perspectives, and behavior that became the motors of civilization. Two main influential schools in the study of western philosophy such as rationalism and empiricism are conflicting. Both favor reason and five senses, but also inseparable from the weaknesses of each that will be revealed by researchers. Likewise the negative impact behind the superiority of western epistemology on the nature and development and existence of humans.