“And whereas philosophers, analytic or not, typically take no interest in anthropology, the best anthropologists are true philosophers. Indeed, their subject matter demands nothing less. Exposing the view of reality that one has internalized as second nature to a cosmology of a genuinely different kind, studying how it is acted upon by a particular indigenous group, supplies a unique opportunity for critical reflection on behalf of one’s own culture and cosmology that it demands allegiance to.”
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1/ Vetlesen on the reduction of ontology to epistemology:
“…the general point Charles Taylor has made on numerous occasions, concerning what Taylor calls the primacy of the epistemological, understood as "the tendency to think out the question of what something is in terms of the question of how it is known" (Taylor 1995 34). Taylor sees this as "a pervasive feature of modern intellectual culture" (ibid.). Notwithstanding attempts to get rid of it, the Cartesian legacy proves persistent…
2/ …the insistence that ‘we can somehow come to grips with the problem of knowledge, and then later proceed to determine what we can legitimately say about other things: about God, or the world, or human life’ (Taylor 1995: vii). In other words, we first need to be clear about the nature of knowledge, hence about ourselves, about our capacities as epistemic subjects, and about what it is to make a defensible claim about the world, or some particular entities in it.”
3/ Coming at the issue from a different angle than Taylor, namely that peculiar to his version of realism, Roy Bhaskar designates the tendency to ‘analyse being in terms of knowledge’ the ‘epistemic fallacy’, involving as he sees it ‘the denial of the possibility of a philosophical ontology’.
4/ It is, Bhaskar argues, ‘a necessary condition for the occurrence of science that the world exists and is of a certain type. Thus the possibility of our knowing is not an essential property, and so cannot be a defining characteristic, of the world’. Accordingly, ‘knowledge follows existence, in logic and time; and any philosophical position which explicitly or implicitly denies this has got things upside down’ (Bhaskar [1975] 2008: 38, 39).”
when considering these issues of epistemology and ontology from the perspective of, say, someone with intellectual disabilities and their caregivers, this obsession with knowing and comprehensibility and rationality has other problems besides these but these ones are often the harder ones to get at, since they are so fundamental to most philosophy
disability was/is my gateway to animism/panpsychism/the beyond of reductive materialism
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is this why I feel increasingly drawn to anthropology as I get older? philosophy as I’ve known it seems more and more like a young persons game
Hiti
हिति , in Nepāl Bhāṣā, is the word for a shared community water tap. Even in modern Newar cities, these ancient structures still pour out fresh mountain water piped through ancient underground filters and conduits. They are a place to wash, to talk, to drink, to meet the locals: a nourishing, refreshing social-ecological place.
Automatic federation enabled