Grupo de Investigação | Research Group:

Epistemologia e Metodologia | Epistemology and Methodology

Investigadores principais | Principal investigators:

Ana Freire

Estado | Status:

Concluído | Concluded

Objectivos || Aims

1. To question how cognitive evolution raises idiosyncratic modes of thought, categorization, logicization, communication, transmission and codification.
2. To foster research on the modes of production, transmission, validation and circulation of trans-european knowledge.
3. To explore the multiplicity and diversity of philosophical and scientific practices.

Enquadramento || Framework

It is taken for granted that European sciences dip their well-established roots into an endogenous ground, located in Greece. At different moments in time, these roots got longer or deeper, older or newer ramifications, mainly "oriental" ones. Actually, before Greece in time, beyond Greece in space, afar from Greece in science, we can notice some considerable hybridization (the most evident with the great discoveries) in an exchange zone yet away from great divides. In these days of transcultural flows and extreme mobility, exchange, circulation of people, objects, knowledge, technology, on multiple dimensions and directions, the distance observer/observed (in space, time, discipline) is shrinking.

Everything has virtually become present all the time in webs - even researchers work into collective networks?

The project, run under the Unity of Science research line, moving from a broad disunity of science to an enfolding plurality of sciences and philosophies, will explore past multiplicities, present diversities and will question future trajectories.

Metodologia || Methodology

Comparative philosophy has a longer and better established history than comparative epistemology. However, this project, backed up by a strong tradition of comparative studies and researches, seeks to reach beyond comparison itself. It will question the status of scientific and philosophical borders through a multi-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary approach. It will lead to the blur between territorial scientific boundaries (spatial, temporal, epistemic) what will consequentely avoid reductionist positions. This synchro-disciplinary approach is likely to show the way beyond the constraints of the comparative approach in different manners. Taking the object of research as a cluster where space, time, discipline and pertinence are here and now intertwined, will multiply points of view, instead of trimming them down. Such clusters of cross-times, cross-spaces, cross-disciplines, cross-trajectories, are certainly less stable, leading both to the "extreme different" or to the "extreme same" ? to the in-commensurability or to the invariance, but the new objects thus resulting from the research will differ from the compared ones.

At the risk of reaching the conclusion that modern science is an ethno-science, or western philosophy is an ethno-philosophy, the project will endorse the challenges of (in)commensurability, questioning and rethinking regularly unquestioned agendas.