Obligations towards "Good" Sciences: Philosophy Involved in Clay and Word-Work

• In Event: Situated Ethics and Normativities in Knowledge Making and Communities of Practice - II

Abstract

This paper explores how philosophers achieve whatever they consider as ‘good’ science by ethnographically attending to their daily scientific work. Keeping open what counts as ‘good’ philosophy seem to be a key feature of philosophy: there is not one but there are different ‘good’ philosophies that instantiate as different ‘styles’ (Kwa 2011; Crombie 1994). Styles refer to clusters of convictions on views about the nature and its knowability, science itself and the social conceptions of what is desirable/possible (Crombie 1994). This paper expands on the question how (studying) ‘good science’ relates to knowledge politics and ethics. Studying the daily scientific work of philosophers through the interactions between the material settings, the activities of the participants, and the styles embedded in them, I learn how ‘obligations’ as matters of hesitation (Stengers 2007) shape doing science ‘as well as possible’ (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). The everydayness of ‘good’ philosophies suggests that depending on how obligations are attended to and toward whom or what they are practiced, different philosophies shape different possible societal-academic-togethers. What seems to be a challenge is to hold the tension between cherishing differences in styles, while also moving on together across differences. What do different styles of philosophy teach us about the potential of obligations as a concept to foster co-labouring (de la Cadena 2015) across differences in styles and their related possible societal-academic-togethers?

Author

• Sonja Jerak-Zuiderent, Amsterdam University Medical Centers