Emerging Epistemologies

Our established, age-old notions of knowledge have ceased to be meaningful in postnormal times. What we define as true knowledge, and the ways in which we create it, have changed radically. The emergence of ‘Big Data’ and Artificial Intelligence, as well as ‘fake news’, ‘alternative facts’, ‘deep fake’, and ‘post-truth’ have changed the nature of knowledge production. Established disciplines, such as economics, sociology, anthropology, political science, have lost their significance. Revengeful capitalism, based on profit-driven algorithms, has not only led to environmental destruction, but has also ruined our understanding of what actually constitutes knowledge. In an era that defines societies by questions of knowledge, it becomes necessary and urgent to ask: how is knowledge produced, how is it distributed, and who decides what is true knowledge and what is not? Emerging Epistemologies explores the changing nature of knowledge production and investigates how emerging epistemologies are transforming our perceptions of the pres - ent and the future. The contributors to the volume examine digital landscapes, zombie disciplines, higher education, the role of metaphysics, and epistemological justice; and argue that epistemology does not exist in a vacuum but is determined and embedded in the worldview and culture of society. The chaos and contradiction that accompanies our increasingly complex world requires us to see through ‘the smog of ignorance’, and seek new ways of thinking and creating knowledge that promotes sustainability, diversity, social justice and appreciates different ways of knowing, being, and doing.

Through detailed readings and interviews, this book provides a valuable introduction to feminist language-poets and to some of the most compelling issues in contemporary poetry.

The four articles, two review essays, various book reviews, and obituary contained in this issue all revolve around contestations of Islamic authority. Notably, two of these articles are drawn from the AJIS symposium on Maqāṣid whose first set of essays were featured in the previous issue (38:3-4) dedicated to the topic. In the first article, “Agents of Grace,” Ali Altaf Mian develops a sophisticated and nuanced reading of “intentionality” in the work of the moral theologian al-Ghazali. Mian reads the latter’s work to disclose ethical action as a site of contingency and ambivalence, indeed of the subject’s “non-sovereignty.” He contributes this theorization of intentionality as a constructive critique of accounts of ethical agency in the anthropology of Islam. In the second article, “No Scholars in the West,” Emily Goshey carefully unpacks the ostensible paradox by which Western Salafis who studied in the Muslim world are not seen as “scholars” by the very communities they lead. What then comprises religious authority and scholarship within these models of knowledge transmission? Goshey tracks the dynamics of scholarship and community leadership based on fieldwork with African American Salafi affiliate communities in Philadelphia. In the third article, “Maqāṣidi Models for an ‘Islamic’ Medical Ethics,” Aasim Padela presents a typology of maqāṣid-based approaches to medical ethics. Whether requiring a field-based redefinition, a conceptual extension, or a text-based postulation of the classical maqāṣid theory, however, Padela shows that these frameworks remain woefully underdeveloped to offer appropriate and sufficient guidance for pressing bedside cases. In the fourth article, “Developing an Ethic of Justice,” Thahir Jamal Kiliyamannil offers a creative rereading of new Muslim movements in South India. Rather than relying on old typologies about political Islam or secularized activists, he considers the Solidarity Youth Movement to articulate an Islamic ethic of justice inspired by Abul A’la Maududi. This case study shows not only how the maqāṣid framework may inform discourses well beyond the domains of legal practice, but also how this specific articulation of political justice is based in the praxis of the Indian Muslim minority. These four articles and the remaining elements of the issue foreground contemporary contestations of Islamic authority. Read together, they also offer a set of terms for thinking productively about its contours, limits, affordances, and possibilities.

This book explores the concept of 'cognitive injustice': the failure to recognise the different ways of knowing by which people across the globe run their lives and provide meaning to their existence. Boaventura de Sousa Santos shows why global social justice is not possible without global cognitive justice. Santos argues that Western domination has profoundly marginalised knowledge and wisdom that had been in existence in the global South. She contends that today it is imperative to recover and valorize the epistemological diversity of the world. Epistemologies of the South outlines a new kind of bottom-up cosmopolitanism, in which conviviality, solidarity and life triumph against the logic of market-ridden greed and individualism.

This book shows the importance of knowledge production using requisite terms and frameworks to the broader scheme of epistemic liberation in Africa. The text considers what this veritable direction to knowledge production would mean to other areas of concern in African philosophy such as morality, education and the environment. These contributions are important because the success of decolonising projects in African countries depend upon the methods that underpin envisioned liberative knowledge production in light of Africa’s historical and present condition. This volume appeals to students and researchers working in epistemology and African philosophy.

Since its publication in 1968 Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed has maintained its relevance well into the 21st century. This book showcases the multitude of ways in which Freire's most celebrated work is being reinvented by contemporary, educators, activists, teachers, and researchers. The chapters cover topics such as: spirituality, teacher identity and education, critical race theory, post-truth, academic tenure, prison education, LGBTQ educators, critical pedagogy, posthumanism and indigenous education. There are also chapters which explore Freire's work in relation to W.E.B Du Bois, Myles Horton, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Simone de Beauvoir. Written by leading first and second-generation Freirean scholars, the book includes a foreword by Ira Shor and an afterword by Antonia Darder.

This volume features new perspectives on the implications of cross-linguistic and cultural diversity for epistemology. It brings together philosophers, linguists, and scholars working on knowledge traditions to advance work in epistemology that moves beyond the Anglophone sphere. The first group of chapters provide evidence of cross-linguistic or cultural diversity relevant to epistemology and discuss its possible implications. These essays defend epistemic pluralism based on Sanskrit data as a commitment to pluralism about epistemic stances, analyze the use of two Japanese knowledge verbs in relation to knowledge how, explore the Confucian notion of justification, and surveys cultural differences about the testimonial knowledge. The second group of chapters defends "core monism"—which claims that despite the cross-linguistic diversity of knowledge verbs, there is certain core epistemological meaning shared by all languages—from both a Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) and skeptical perspective. The third cluster of essays considers the implications of cultural diversity for epistemology based on anthropological studies. These chapters explore real disparities in folk epistemology across cultures. Finally, the last two chapters discuss methods or perspectives to unify epistemology despite and based on the diversity of folk intuitions and epistemological concepts. Ethno-Epistemology is an essential resource for philosophers working in epistemology and comparative philosophy, as well as linguists and cultural anthropologists interested in the cultural-linguistic diversity of knowledge traditions.