Political Epistemology without Apologies

Zusammenfassung

Political epistemology is a vibrant field of research that has become quite popular in recent years. It sets itself the ambitious task to intertwine epistemology with social and political theory in order to do justice to the internal relationships between truth and knowledge on the one hand, and politics and society on the other. However, many contributions either expand arguments and concepts from traditional epistemology to political phenomena or use existing theories and frameworks from social and political theory to address the politics of epistemological questions. Both fail to accomplish what political epistemology promises: the former leads to an epistemisation of politics coupled with its de-politicization, the latter to a politicizations of epistemic phenomena and concepts couple with its de-epistemisation. The argument presented in the talk aims to show that intertwining epistemology with social and political theory must transforms of both sub-disciplines, due to three basic requirements: minimal materialism, radical self-reflection and epistemic non-sovereignty.