Imperfect Cognitions

Today's blog is by Matteo Fiorani (University of Rome, Tor Vergata) and it is the last in a series of posts associated with the special issue of the European Journal of Analytic Philosophy on Bounds of Rationality . Matteo's paper (open access) is entitled: " Rationality, Irrationality and Irrationalism in the Anti-institutional Debate in Psychiatry around the Second-Half of the 1970s in Italy ". Matteo Fiorani The 1968 movements overwhelmed psychiatry with anti-authoritarian and anti-institutional criticism. The young protesters demanded, first of all, the rights of madness and, provocatively, of unreason. At the same time, they dismissed the dominant normality, represented by bourgeois common sense. They also affirmed the need not to repress contradictions and suffering. Emotions and affectivity were indeed part of the social and political world. From these premises it was possible to develop a deep political and cultural reflection on the boundary between reason a...

Today's post is by J. Adam Carter , lecturer in Philosophy, University of Glasgow. In this post, he introduces his new book Metaepistemology and Relativism. The question of whether knowledge and other epistemic standings like justification are (in some interesting way) relative, is one that gets strikingly different kinds of answers, depending on who you ask. In humanities departments outside philosophy, the idea of ‘absolute’ or ‘objective’ knowledge is widely taken to be, as Richard Rorty (e.g., 1980) had thought, a naïve fiction —one that a suitable appreciation of cultural diversity and historical and other contingencies should lead us to disavow. A similar kind of disdain for talk of knowledge as objective has been voiced—albeit for different reasons—by philosophers working in the sociology of scientific knowledge (e.g., Barry Barnes, David Bloor, Steven Shapin). Adam Carter And yet, within contemporary mainstream epistemology —roughly, the branch of philoso...