Making Modern Epistemology
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Published:October 2024
Chapter 3 reframes the historical inquiry of the previous chapters as a philosophical project. Drawing on the work of Edmund Husserl, it describes his concept of epoché and explains how it allows a rereading of Descartes's meditation on wax in the context of his anatomical experiments. It further argues that the elimination of hands-on notions from the Cartesian epistemological project is the result of a philosophical operation that can be described with the Husserlian concept of Unterschiebung. Finally, it elaborates the idea of a hands-on perspective as a point of departure for epistemological considerations. Drawing on Jenny Slatman's reading of Husserl's and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological conception of the body, the chapter explicates how a body can be experienced both as mine and as a foreign thing. It prepares the ground for an epistemological critique that foregrounds our bodies' persistent presence and reflects on the resistance of experimenters' bodies to becoming transparent.
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