Abstract
Since the famous passage in which Socrates (Plato 1997) says that the unexamined, and therefore non-reflected, life is not worth living, “reflection” has been a diffuse and iterant term in ethics, moral philosophy, epistemology, political philosophy (Tiberius 2008; Skorupski 2010), but also in psychology (Marsico et al. 2015). This volume opens a new perspective on the topic of reflection, considering the most recent approaches in both philosophy (namely in epistemology) and cultural psychology.
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Notes
- 1.
There is a rich literature about the moral aspect of reflection. In this volume, we focus on the epistemological aspects. About the moral perspective, see Korsgaard (2008) and Ransome (2009). Mayr (2011) and Doris (2015) discuss a criticism of reflectivism. Kornblith (2012) provides a critical literature overview of different aspects of the current debate about reflection.
- 2.
Besides, there is disagreement about the relationship between being an agent of one’s own actions, responsible for these actions, and being an epistemic agent , responsible for one’s own beliefs. Pascal Engel (2013) writes: “there is a limit to any claim that we can be epistemic agents, which is that the structure of reasons for epistemic attitudes differs fundamentally from the structure of reasons for actions” (p. 158).
- 3.
- 4.
For a full overview of the debate, see Kornblith (2001)
- 5.
Some of the topics developed in the following paragraphs also appear in Silva Filho and Rocha (2015).
- 6.
In Judgment and Agency (Sosa 2015), Sosa talks about something inferior to animal knowledge (subcredal animal knowledge) and considers various degrees, up to the maximum human degree, which is knowing full well; here it is possible to conceive not two, but three levels of knowledge: animal, reflective and full. We will not address this point here.
- 7.
- 8.
One of the central questions of the epistemology of disagreements (accepting that this is a rational disagreement) is: what should be done when one is aware of disagreement - continue to believe the initial belief, renounce the belief or suspend judgment . The main publications that provide an overview of this discussion are Feldman and Warfield (2010), Christensen and Lackey (2013), Frances (2014), and Matheson (2015).
- 9.
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Acknowledgments
The editors are grateful to the institutions that provided intellectual and material support to the making of this volume. Waldomiro Silva Filho thanks the CNPq (Brazil) for the research grant “Bolsa de Produtividade em Pesquisa (#312111/2016-9)”, the CAPES (Brazil) for the international senior visiting grant (BEX 2706/15-6) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, Cambridge, MA), as visiting researcher between 2015 and 2016. He is also grateful to CONCEPT (Cologne Center for Contemporary Epistemology and the Kantian Tradition) of Universität zu Köln (Cologne, Germany) that had him as visiting professor between 2017 and 2018. The idea of this book originated during the visiting at MIT, under the supervision of Prof. Agustin Rayo and the courses of Prof. Alex Byrne. The period at CONCEPT was useful for the final organization of the book and, for these reasons, a special thanks is due to Prof. Sven Bernecker and to Felipe Rocha, his principal interlocutor. Finally, Silva Filho is grateful to the Department of Philosophy at Universidade Federal da Bahia (UFBA) for creating the institutional conditions allowing his periods of leave in order to accomplish research staying abroad.
Luca Tateo is grateful to the Universidade Federal da Bahia (UFBA) for hosting his research stays as an international visiting professor, during which he has had the opportunity to establish a very fruitful dialogue between Europe and Brazil and between cultural psychology and a number of other disciplines.
Felipe Rocha L. Santos contributed to this introduction and he is grateful to the Department of Philosophy at Universidade Federal da Bahia (UFBA), for hosting him in the postdoctoral fellowship program PNPD (Programa Nacional de Pós-Doutorado), and also to CONCEPT (Cologne Center for Contemporary Epistemology and the Kantian Tradition) of Universität zu Köln (Cologne, Germany), where he has been visiting scholar between June and August 2017.
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Silva-Filho, W.J., Tateo, L., Santos, F.R.L. (2019). Introduction: Examined Live – An Epistemological Exchange Between Philosophy and Cultural Psychology on Reflection. In: Silva-Filho, W., Tateo, L. (eds) Thinking About Oneself. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 141. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18266-3_1
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