Description | Location: Kane Hall, Room 110 Title: "Objectivity and the Humanities--Prospects for a New Realism" In this lecture, Markus Gabriel will argue that we need to change our paradigm concerning objectivity in the humanities. Over the last decades, the humanities have come under pressure from the scientific worldview. To many, it seems as if the humanities provide us at best with less-than-objective knowledge claims. Arguably, there are at least two overall reasons for this. On the one hand, the scientific worldview tends to associate objectivity with the kind of knowledge-acquisition, explanation, and justification characteristic of the natural sciences. On the other hand, the humanities themselves have contributed to the impression that they might be less relevant than the natural sciences to epistemic progress due to internal problems having to do with the very concept(s) of knowledge, reality and objectivity. New Realism is a term for a whole series of current trends in philosophy that has important consequences for our understanding of knowledge in general. In particular, it reshapes our account of the human being qua source and object of knowledge claims. In this context, New Realism draws on a crucial indispensability thesis: we simply cannot eliminate the standpoint from which humans gather information about human and non-human reality alike from our account of reality itself. In light of this thesis, it turns out that the humanities are fully-fledged contributions to objective knowledge about reality – a fact we cannot ignore without succumbing to illusion. Against this background, the talk concludes that the so-called “scientific worldview” is untenable: it is built upon a denial of knowledge we actually possess, and so, by not being scientific enough, it fails to respect its own premises. A leading figure in the movement for a new realism, Markus Gabriel (Chair of Epistemology and Modern and Contemporary Philosophy; Director of the International Center for Philosophy; Director of the Center for Science and Thought; Bonn University, Germany) is the author of eleven books and nine co-edited volumes. His major works are the best-selling Why the World Does Not Exist (2013); Fields of Sense: A New Realist Ontology (2015); I Am Not a Brain: Philosophy of Mind for the Twenty-First Century (2017); Neo-Existentialism (2018); Transcendental Ontology: Essays in German Idealism (2011), and a volume co-authored with Slavoj Zizek, Mythology, Madness, and Laughter: Subjectivity in German Idealism (2009). His work is being translated into nine languages, including Chinese, Japanese, and Turkish. Note that the event is free, but advance registration is required. You can register at: events.uw.edu… |
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