Book Review contributions are single-authored or multiple-authored reviews of recent books in the area of social epistemology.
One of the best things about reading this particular masterwork of Li Zehou—several of his writings have secured that status—is Li’s steadfast refusal to ignore the material basis for realities in the remote past. Li’s history may be the perfect… Read More ›
The historian in me surveys the academic fads of the last forty years in her field, including the overblown and rather dubious celebrations of cultural memory and cultural representation. Come and gone is the craze for the digital humanities (merrily… Read More ›
When I reread Li Zehou’s A History of Chinese Classical Thought (published in Chinese in 1980), I am struck by three things: (1) How much more we know about early China now, in 2020, than we knew forty years ago,… Read More ›
As I commit my thoughts to ink on paper, I hear a fly buzzing around my ear. The fly happened to fly from a workshop about relativism, and its varieties, as it occurs in today’s society. Needless to say, I… Read More ›
The career of Li Zehou has been shaped by its, at times, fortunate timing. He was able to establish his reputation as one of China’s leading philosophers during a time, after the death of Mao Zedong, when thinkers were allowed… Read More ›
Imagine receiving an invitation to be an author of a paper, intended for publication in a leading journal. The paper has several authors; you are listed as second author. Along with the invitation comes a copy of the completed paper,… Read More ›
Catherine Lyall’s Being an Interdisciplinary Academic: How Institutions Shape University Careers (2019) describes the lives of early-career interdisciplinary scholars and analyzes the difficulties and systematic problems they experience. Lyall lends encouragement both to these researchers and to those considering entering… Read More ›
Imagine looking at a computer desktop. You see various icons that you can modify, move around, stick into folders and delete. The desktop is a type of reality. If you wanted, you could formulate an ontology and epistemology, or laws… Read More ›
Regarding the issue of social epistemology, the present book is an important source for obtaining a better understanding of such models of constructing knowledge which are based on collective experiences, and which simultaneously offer manifold insights into its social dimensions…. Read More ›
Catherine Lyall’s (2019) Being an Interdisciplinary Academic: How Institutions Shape University Careers draws on research data to illustrate the ‘rift between the rhetoric and reality of interdisciplinarity’ (1), with the aim of stimulating discussion that can cross and ideally reconcile… Read More ›