epistemology

Offers a postmodern theory of knowledge based on an ecological worldview that stresses real relations and the pervasiveness of values.Modern thought, finally free from premodern excesses of belief, immediately fell prey to excesses of doubt. This book points toward a postmodern approach to knowing that moves beyond the tired choice between dogma and skepticism. Its key deconstructive aim is to help contemporary philosophers see that their paralyzing modern “epistemological gap” is a myth. Its positive outcome, however, reverses the identification of “postmodern” with deconstruction rather than construction, with the “end of philosophy” rather than renewal in philosophy.Knowing and Value begins by tracing how we got here, and argues that much of our modern dilemma rests on choices that might have gone otherwise. Key value judgments underlying Plato’s and Aristotle’s epistemological norms, which still tend to govern our theories of knowledge, are clarified. Next the value-laden sources of premodern attitudes toward knowing are exposed by showing how the Christian synthesis of faith and reason was at first built by medieval Platonists and Aristotelians, then razed by premodern nominalists. This diagnostic account concludes with a close look at how modernity, from Hobbes and Descartes to Kant, designed its own epistemological trap by rejecting some premodern values, while accepting others.The book also examines the principal ways moderns (positivists, idealists, existentialists, and pragmatists) have tried to cope with the supposed epistemological gap―each without success, but with every failure leaving resources for rebuilding.In a constructive climax, the book shows how an ecological worldview, emphasizing real relations (the view proposed in its predecessor volume, Being and Value) can heal the needless ruptures on which modern epistemic maladies depend. A reformed account of human experience confronts modern skepticism head-on; a fresh “process” approach to language and thinking is proposed; and finally, a postmodern, pluralist view of theories and truth is offered under a guiding aesthetic metaphor: “Knowing is the music of thought.”

Source: amazon.com

Reviewing Andrew McMurry’s Environmental Renaissance, Stephen Dougherty questions the systems approach to ecocriticism.

(source: http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/connected)

Linda Brigham hypercontextualizes contemporary philosophy.

Although a hard-copy book and a hypertext essay hardly present us with apples and oranges, this particular pair troubles the work of comparison. This trouble is not simply a matter of form. Content-wise as well, Arkady Plotnitsky’s interdisciplinary exploration of poststructural metaphysics (or “meta-physics”) and David Kolb’s meditation on the textuality of philosophy relate to each other in a fashion at once too intimate and divergent. Like Blake’s Clod and Pebble from the Songs of Experience, they are contraries, or, to pick up the theme, “complementary.” As Blake would insist, though, it is through such contraries that progress happens.

How can one articulate literary and artistic creation and scientific research? In my case, creative research consists in creating experiences. Indeed I emphasize the notion of experience, or rather experiences: the experiences of the author, of the reader and of the researcher (in the field of digital literature). This approach is based on a variety of first person and third person experiences, subjective experiences and objective descriptions, spontaneous and instrument-based experiences (ie closer to experiments). Conceiving a literary and artistic experience as a scientific experience implies admitting that real life experience can have a scientific dimension. In this approach, I analyse my own productions as well as the productions of other authors. I can think my productions and those of others from a concept-based perspective or from a creative activity perspective, as a literary and artistic experience or as material for a scientific experiment.The challenge is to develop protocols of introspection, data collection and traces which will then reconstruct what happened. Creative research, if it is based on solid protocols, has a lot to teach us about digital writing and digital poetry. As a case study, I will include the research and creation process implemented in the framework of a collaboration with the ALIS company.

(Source: Author's abstract at ELO 2013 conference site: http://conference.eliterature.org/critical-writing/research-and-creatio… )

Digital approaches to information processing foreground the unique interdependence between
knowledge and its representation that has been characteristic of western epistemology for the past five centuries. The essential role representation formats play in modern knowledge construction is generally accepted in all disciplines, attributing, learning and intellectual progress less to one's direct engagement with actual phenomena, and more to notational structures that convey its formulation. In this paradigm, knowledge follows exclusively from its theoretical articulation, not the other way around.

As such, the actual world cannot but appear symptomatic; its material presence reduced to little more than a kind of referential conceit. Michael Heim speaks to this very issue philosophically as early as the 1990s, recognising clear ontological paradoxes in the then newly emergent VR technology: just how our culture understands the term "reality" as an actual environment, he observes, can only weaken and become less physically uncertain "as it stretches over many virtual worlds.”2 Heim's comments recall digital culture's especially complex interactions with the material world around us; yet they capture as well the increasing ontological impasse that has developed over the course of at least a century of intellectual and artistic debate on the relationship of patterns, ordering and schema to what we perceive to be material actualities.

(Source: Author's abstract, 2012 ELO Conference site)

Alan Liu responds to reviews of The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information by N. Katherine Hayles and Johanna Drucker, both of whom admire Liu's book but believe that it exaggerates the influence of corporate knowledge work while providing an inadequate response to its destructive ahistoricism. Liu proposes that the digital age needs "new-media platforms of humanistic instruction" to supplement critical and theoretical humanistic approaches to help students understand how the human concerns and impulses that give rise to new media productions relate to knoweldge work.

Jäger’s essay, going beyond the idea that transcription is a fundamental procedure of cultural semantics, reveals some of the principles that underlie the practices of cultural reconceptualizations attempting to show that and how they are characterized by an epistemology of disruptions.

(Source: Beyond the Screen, introduction by Jörgen Schäfer and Peter Gendolla)