Search results for "Epistemology"
showing 10 items of 1353 documents
Deep Interpretive Disagreements and Theory of Legal Interpretation
2016
This paper deals with deep interpretive disagreements (DID): very profound divergences that may occur in legal interpretation (on single cases, or on similar cases) among judges and jurists. These divergences involve alternative interpretations of certain expressions or phrases (for instance, “human person”, “dignity”, “personal autonomy”, “life”, “health”) and may lead, under certain conditions, to incompatible interpretations of the legal sentences that incorporate these expressions. The most important examples of this kind of legal sentences are constitutional provisions that express principles asserting legal rights. The main thesis of this paper is that DID represent genuine, faultless…
On some difficulties of putting in dialogue animal rights with anthropological debates: a historical view in three episodes
2018
In this paper, I try to identify the reasons why the dialogue between sociocultural anthropology and animal rights theories and movements continues to be difficult and scarce. At first sight this weakness of communication is surprising, if one looks at the amount of anthropological studies on human/animal relationships, in most cases pointing to how animals are considered in many cultures as non- human subjects or persons. For understanding the roots of this state of affairs, I compare the ways anthropologists and animal rights theorists and activists have engaged with the issue of the differences and commonalities between human beings and nonhuman animals. For this aim, I contrast the sear…
How to study bureaucracies ethnographically?
2019
We propose a short epistemological and methodological reflection on the challenges of doing ethnographical research on public services (‘bureaucracies’) from the inside. We start from the recognition of the double face of bureaucracy, as a form of domination and oppression as well as of protection and liberation, and all the ambivalences this dialectic entails. We argue that, in classical Malinowskian fashion, the anthropology of bureaucracy should take bureaucrat as the ‘natives’, and acknowledge their agency. This means adopting basic anthropological postures: the natives (i.e. the bureaucrats) must have good reasons for their seemingly ‘absurd’ (or arbitrary) practices, once you underst…
“Not in Possession of Any Weltanschauung”: Otto Neugebauer’s Flight from Nazi Germany and His Search for Objectivity in Mathematics, in Reviewing, an…
2016
Two major factors have to be considered to account for Neugebauer’s “Weltanschauung”, in particular his apparent or real rejection of philosophical or political judgments. On the one hand, Neugebauer, as a mathematician and a historian, had to cope, with the double character of mathematics as a science in its continuity and universality, independent of time, and of mathematics as a characteristic and fundamental product of each individual culture. On the other hand emphasis has to be put on Neugebauer being torn between organizational work (institution building, reviewing, editing) and historical research. One has to consider the vicissitudes of Neugebauer’s long and eventful life, which wa…
Empiricism and Relationism Intertwined: Hume and Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity
2016
Einstein acknowledged that his reading of Hume influenced the development of his special theory of relativity. In this article, I juxtapose Hume’s philosophy with Einstein’s philosophical analysis related to his special relativity. I argue that there are two common points to be found in their writings, namely an empiricist theory of ideas and concepts, and a relationist ontology regarding space and time. The main thesis of this article is that these two points are intertwined in Hume and Einstein.
Introduction special issue Marx & discourse
2018
This year marks the 200th birthday of Karl Marx, one of the most influential thinkers of the social sciences and humanities. We take this anniversary as an opportunity to explore the various relati...
Ideologies as false communicative practices
2021
Against common understanding of ideology as being a specific form of knowledge or cognition, lately there is a rediscovering of the notion of ideology as practice. In these approaches, ideology is ...
Integrating self, voice, experience
2018
AbstractThe experience of hearing one’s own voice during the act of speaking is a form of self-awareness and self-reflection that occurs in relation to and in interaction with the flow of experience, including the experience of other selves and their voices. Self-communication is deeply implicated in and necessary for interpersonal communication (Harris 1996). And yet, it is the latter which is generally taken to be the paradigm case of human languaging. The fundamental role of self-communication is neglected in the language sciences. Starting with the important fact that we hear our own voice when we speak (Harris 1996, chap. 11), this paper examines the central role of self-communication …
Suffering as an anchor of critique. The place of critique in critical discourse studies
2017
If we engage in reflection on standards of critique, we are entering the terrain of metaethics, or the question of which ethical standards we should accept. The question is not only, in the sense o...