Category archives: Epistemology

Scientific censorship for a greater good?

Scientific censorship for a greater good?

EpistemologyPhilosophy of sciencePsychologySociology

By Invited Researcher

“Censorship” is not a pleasant word to anyone. Its connotations are almost always negative and, in the first instance, an effort should be made to find circumstances that justify a restriction of information. Even more so in the scientific field, where empirical evidence should prevail over authority, tradition, rhetorical eloquence or social prestige. Science seeks […]

Mining Wikipedia to unveil emergent interdisciplinary knowledge

Mining Wikipedia to unveil emergent interdisciplinary knowledge

Computer scienceDIPC MestizajesEpistemology

By DIPC

Specialisation has necessarily led to the fragmentation of knowledge, creating loosely connected disciplines in which discoveries in one area are hardly known in others. This implies that the flow of knowledge is severely restricted among disciplines or even among different areas within the same discipline. In recent decades, different approaches have been proposed to overcome […]

Skepticism, a short uncertain story (8): Do you have a brain or a religion?

Skepticism, a short uncertain story (8): Do you have a brain or a religion?

EpistemologyPhilosophy of science

By Jesús Zamora Bonilla

As you can imagine from the reading of the previous entries, it was by no means an easy task to transform skepticism into a weapon against religious belief. This does not entail that criticisms of religion tout court had failed to exist before, say, the late Modern Age. Not to mention again our adorable Greeks […]

Skepticism, a short uncertain history (6): The mother of all lost causes

Skepticism, a short uncertain history (6): The mother of all lost causes

EpistemologyPhilosophy of science

By Jesús Zamora Bonilla

Descartes’ opening of the Pandora’s box of skepticism, and the liberation of the Evil Demon it triggered, started a terrible shock in the tectonic plates of Western thought, a shock whose waves still reach us with more or less strength, and that mainly contributed to configure our contemporary intellectual landscape. I shall devote the next […]

Skepticism, a short uncertain history (5): Descartes’ evil daemon

Skepticism, a short uncertain history (5): Descartes’ evil daemon

EpistemologyPhilosophy of science

By Jesús Zamora Bonilla

Together with the discovery of America, the Protestant Reformation was probably the main historical factor in the (European) Modern Age. As we saw in the previous entry, the debate between different Christian denominations was a perfect breeding ground to put into use the recently rediscovered arguments of the ancient Greek Skeptics (though in practice the […]

Skepticism, a short uncertain story (4): the renaissance of skepticism

Skepticism, a short uncertain story (4): the renaissance of skepticism

EpistemologyPhilosophy of science

By Jesús Zamora Bonilla

As we saw in the previous entry of this series, skepticism had a relatively minor role during the development of medieval philosophy, with the main exception of the interesting possibility of interpreting the Pseudo-Dionysius as a skeptic about our knowledge of the nature of God (not, of course, of its being… save for ‘being’ being […]

Skepticism, a short uncertain story (3): medieval doubts

Skepticism, a short uncertain story (3): medieval doubts

EpistemologyPhilosophy of science

By Jesús Zamora Bonilla

Perhaps you ignore that the most influential philosopher of the early Middle Ages did not really exist. This Zenoan paradox is explained by the fact that the writings of this philosopher were falsely attributed to a different, and much more authoritative person, and hence, after the counterfeit was established about one thousand years later by […]