This post is by Helene Cæcilie Mørck (MA), academic, expert by experience and choreographer, who recently attended and talked at Too Mad to Be True III: Paradoxes of Madness , held on October 30–31, 2024, at the Dr. Guislain Museum in Ghent, Belgium. The conference was organised by Jasper Feyaerts (Ghent University), Bart Marius (Director of the Dr. Guislain Museum), and Wouter Kusters (Foundation for Psychiatry & Philosophy). Opening speech by Jasper Feyaerts (Ghent University) This year’s theme explored the notion of contradiction and paradox in madness, philosophy, and related fields. With over 60 speakers, including five keynote presenters, the conference offered a remarkable diversity of perspectives that challenged conventional understandings of madness. Despite the breadth of content and the tight two-day schedule, the experience was intense, deeply enriching, and empowering. Many speakers lived with or had personal experiences of madness, bringing an i...
Today's post is from Karl Landström on his paper ' On Epistemic Freedom and Epistemic Injustice ', recently published in Inquiry . Karl Landström ‘Seek ye epistemic freedom first’ is how Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni begins his book Epistemic Freedom in Africa: Deprovincialization and Decolonization (2018, 1). Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s book is a detailed study of the politics of knowing and knowledge production with emphasis on what he calls ‘the African struggle for epistemic freedom’. He locates the struggle for epistemic freedom in the continued entrapment of knowledge production in Africa within colonial, Euro- and North America-centric matrices of power. The central contribution of the book is the development of a general account of epistemic freedom. For Ndlovu-Gatsheni, epistemic freedom entails the right to think, theorise and develop one’s own methodologies to interpret the world, and write from where one is located unencumbered by Eurocentrism. Further, he argues tha...