Dites bonjour à Wiredu (1931— ) Kwasi Wiredu is a philosopher from Ghana, who has for decades been involved with a project he terms “conceptual decolonization” in contemporary African systems of thought. By conceptual decolonization, Wiredu advocates a re-examination of current African epistemic formations in order to accomplish two aims. D'abord, he wishes to subvert unsavory aspects of tribal culture embedded in modern African thought so as to

Pseudoscience and the Demarcation Problem The demarcation problem in philosophy of science refers to the question of how to meaningfully and reliably separate science from pseudoscience. Both the terms “science” and “pseudoscience” are notoriously difficult to define precisely, except in terms of family resemblance. The demarcation problem has a long history, tracing back at the least to a speech given by Socrates in Plato’s Charmides,

Edmond Husserl (1859—1938) Although not the first to coin the term, it is uncontroversial to suggest that the German philosopher, Edmond Husserl (1859-1938), is the “father” of the philosophical movement known as phenomenology. Phenomenology can be roughly described as the sustained attempt to describe experiences (and the “things themselves”) without metaphysical and theoretical speculations. Husserl suggested that only by suspending or bracketing away the “natural

Contextualism in Epistemology In very general terms, epistemological contextualism maintains that whether one knows is somehow relative to context. Certain features of contexts—features such as the intentions and presuppositions of the members of a conversational context—shape the standards that one must meet in order for one’s beliefs to count as knowledge. This allows for the possibility that different contexts set different epistemic standards, and contextualists

L'éthique et l'épistémologie de la confiance La confiance est un sujet d'intérêt philosophique de longue date car elle est indispensable au succès de presque tous les types d'activités humaines coordonnées., de la politique et des affaires au sport et à la recherche scientifique. Encore plus, la confiance est nécessaire à la diffusion réussie des connaissances, et, par extension, pour presque toute forme de délibération et de planification pratique qui nous oblige à

The Aim of Belief It is often said that belief has an aim. This aim has been traditionally identified with truth and, since the late 1990s, with knowledge. With this claim, philosophers designate a feature of belief according to which believing a proposition carries with it some sort of commitment or teleological directedness toward the truth (or knowledge) of that proposition. This feature is taken