Mission: "Epistemology Through Dialogue"
Everyone has an epistemology.
It is the narratives and understandings through which we assume to know the world.
Everyone's epistemology is contingent, contestable and falsifiable.
My epistemology has changed and developed over many years.
This has occurred through dialogue, study, enquiry, searching and frustration and disappointment.
Whatever our epistemology we must be prepared to defend it though dialogue.
The moment we stop being prepared to defend it in dialogue is the moment it collapses into ontology. This is a place where knowledge is asserted as the one and only truth and therefor does not require defence in dialogue.
I recall the profound influence the theorists of the Frankfurt school had on my epistemology. Herbert Marcus, and the rest. The idea that within us was a core of love which Freud had identified within the id that was always present ready to emancipate us seemed to me so immanent. No matter how much authoritarian rulers repressed us they could not eliminate the human desire for love and intimacy and this would lurk within our Id's ready to jump up and free us from alienation and exploitation. It was a theory that saw the birth of a golden era in the 60's and 70's wher love was the answer - and free love at that. This group of theories were pulled together with other concepts derived from the philosophers and Sociologists like alienation, anomie, hegemony and the rest to build what I thought was a formidable epistemology.
It was not until much later that I began to think that maybe woman's emancipation lie not in the id but in our minds and in our consciousness. I became interested in a theorist called Habermas who posited that it was not all the physical actions that counted so much in the World as the Communicative actions. It was not the id but the mind in dialogue with others that was the key to emancipation.
More to come
It is the narratives and understandings through which we assume to know the world.
Everyone's epistemology is contingent, contestable and falsifiable.
My epistemology has changed and developed over many years.
This has occurred through dialogue, study, enquiry, searching and frustration and disappointment.
Whatever our epistemology we must be prepared to defend it though dialogue.
The moment we stop being prepared to defend it in dialogue is the moment it collapses into ontology. This is a place where knowledge is asserted as the one and only truth and therefor does not require defence in dialogue.
I recall the profound influence the theorists of the Frankfurt school had on my epistemology. Herbert Marcus, and the rest. The idea that within us was a core of love which Freud had identified within the id that was always present ready to emancipate us seemed to me so immanent. No matter how much authoritarian rulers repressed us they could not eliminate the human desire for love and intimacy and this would lurk within our Id's ready to jump up and free us from alienation and exploitation. It was a theory that saw the birth of a golden era in the 60's and 70's wher love was the answer - and free love at that. This group of theories were pulled together with other concepts derived from the philosophers and Sociologists like alienation, anomie, hegemony and the rest to build what I thought was a formidable epistemology.
It was not until much later that I began to think that maybe woman's emancipation lie not in the id but in our minds and in our consciousness. I became interested in a theorist called Habermas who posited that it was not all the physical actions that counted so much in the World as the Communicative actions. It was not the id but the mind in dialogue with others that was the key to emancipation.
More to come
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