ABSTRACT
The issues around knowledge – what can we know about the world, how do we know it, what is the status of our experiences – have been central to philosophical reflection for ages. Answers to these questions, admittedly oversimplified here, have traditionally taken one of two forms. On the one hand there is the belief that the world can be made rationally transparent, that with enough hard work, knowledge about the world can be made objective. Thinkers like Descartes and Habermas are often framed as being responsible for this kind of attitude. It goes under numerous names including positivism, modernism, objectivism, rationalism and epistemological fundamentalism. On the other hand, there is the belief that knowledge is only possible from a personal or cultural-specific perspective, and that it can therefore never be objective or universal. This position is ascribed, correctly or not, to numerous thinkers in the more recent past like Kuhn, Rorty and Derrida, and its many names include relativism, idealism, post-modernism, perspectivism and flapdoodle.
