Background: Readers of Don Quixote have long divided between two verdicts: the knight is mad, or the knight is a martyr to a disenchanted world. Both readings assume that the truth of his acts lies inside the acts themselves; this paper argues that it lies in the world’s answer.
Methods: The paper develops pretension as an epistemic category and constructs a three-term reading grammar — frame, uptake, and aftermath — through Austin, Butler, Goffman, Schechner, and related theories of performance and recognition. It applies this grammar to two structurally opposed scenes in Cervantes’s novel: the inn where Quixote is dubbed a knight and the windmill plain where his wager is refused, and a third, where the verdict is neither granted nor refused but held in dispute.
Analysis: At the inn, the keeper grants sanction without belief: the rite is completed, the designation acquires social currency, and Quixote leaves with a standing conferred by others. On the plain, Sancho refuses endorsement of the frame, and the same kind of wager returns to Quixote as error and madness.
Conclusion: Madness and genius are not simply differences of content or psychology; they are also verdicts rendered by audiences before whom claims are staged. The paper extends this structure to scholarship itself, where knowledge is never ratified privately but waits on uptake.
Novelty: The article reclaims pretension from its moral weight and proposes it as a technical term for performance with consciousness of performance, tested by social uptake.
This paper explores how Dennis Kelly creates a destabilised epistemological landscape through the formal conventions of verbatim theatre. Though the play imitates documentary realism, it subverts the authority of testimony at once, revealing a deepening crisis in the production and transmission of truth. Taking Care of Baby is faced with the essential task that underlies this entire project: a documentary, in name, reveals how institutional discourses—legal, psychological and media—both mediate and distort individual testimony. It opens up some important questions about who can speak, whose knowledge is recognised, and how the truth is constructed or denied in these power-inflected frameworks. The paper seeks to explore how the play performs the decay of epistemically trust and the sidelining of lived experience, specifically regarding the protagonist, Donna McAuliffe. Drawing on Miranda Fricker’s theoretical framework of epistemic injustice, the study investigates both testimonial injustices, when a speaker’s credibility is deflated through prejudice, and hermeneutical injustice, when interpretative resources needed to make sense of certain experiences are lacking in a collective. It asks (1) In what ways does the play imitate and overturn mechanisms of verity theatre as a method to challenge truths in charge? (2) In what manner do institutional voices perpetrate epistemic violence on the protagonist? (3) How is the audience complicit in processes of signification and misrecognition? The paper uses a qualitative methodological approach and combines close reading with discourse analysis to study narrative structure, fragmented testimonies and the intertextuality of contending voices. Attention is given to how the interview format of the play creates an illusion of authenticity even as it lays bare its artificiality. Kelly’s action, the study finds, creates what might be called an “epistemic collapse,” in which no single story reaches authoritative status, and all accounts are made suspect. This fall also critiques institutional power, implicating the audience as one complicit in validating or denying claims to truth. In the end, the play reveals how fragile knowledge systems are and emphasises the human costs involved in erasing marginalised voices.
Asst. Prof. Dr. Haider Luaibi Saad· lark· 0 citations
Advocates of conditional security appeal to John 15:6, where an unfruitful branch is cast forth, withered, gathered, and burned, as evidence that a genuine believer can forfeit salvation. This study argues that such a reading conflates two distinct biblical questions, how a person is justified before God and how a justified person serves God, and thereby violates a foundational rule of interpretation: clear passages must govern obscure ones. Beginning from the plain and repeated testimony of Scripture that salvation is received through faith alone in the finished work of Jesus Christ (John 3:16; Romans 4:5; Ephesians 2:8-9) and is possessed as a present, irrevocable reality (John 5:24; John 10:28-29; Romans 8:38-39), the paper reads the vine-and-branches discourse in its own context. It shows that the audience of John 15 is already regenerate (“clean,” John 15:3), that abiding is a fellowship term describing the believer’s experience rather than the ground of justification, and that fruit denotes the spiritual reproduction and Christlike character produced when a believer walks in the Spirit. The burning of verse 6 is identified as temporal chastisement and loss of reward at the judgment seat of Christ, consistent with the wider biblical use of fire for divine discipline (Psalm 104:4; Hebrews 12:29; 1 Corinthians 3:10-15) and with Christ’s use of severe language to provoke believers to fruitfulness (Matthew 5:13). John 15, it concludes, does not contradict eternal security but presupposes it, addressing the believer’s service, communion, and reward rather than the possession of everlasting life.
Miranda Fricker's concept of epistemic injustice and Axel Honneth's theory of recognition have each been applied, separately, to chronic pain. The relationship between them is usually construed as sequential: epistemic injustice is thought to produce failures of recognition, or prior misrecognition to ground later epistemic marginalisation. This article rejects that reading. It argues that, in the clinical encounter with a person in pain, the relation between the two is not exhausted by causal succession. They are analytically separable dimensions of a single intersubjective relation, dimensions that cannot, in that encounter, be treated apart without descriptive and practical loss. The act by which a clinician withholds credibility from a patient's testimony is the same act by which recognition is refused to that patient as a suffering subject. The claim is offered as a heuristic rather than an ontological thesis. Pain is presented not as uniquely paradigmatic but as a particularly illuminating case within a broader class of testimonially dependent suffering, since its privacy, its dependence on testimony, and the mediating role of diagnostic language converge in it with unusual clarity. The argument bears on recognition theory; on medical ethics, where remedies addressed to one dimension alone prove insufficient; and on clinical practice, where diagnostic classification operates as a technology of recognition.
H. Bornemann-Cimenti· Medicine, Health care and Ph...· 0 citations
This paper critically examines Haoying Liu’s recent challenge to Russellian monism (RM), often understood as the view that (1) physics describes natural phenomena entirely in structural terms; (2) such phenomena possess intrinsic characters, or quiddities, that constitute or ground what physics describes structurally; and (3) phenomenal consciousness is constituted, at least in part, by such quiddities. Liu argues that RM’s appeal is undermined by the epistemic inaccessibility of quiddities and their combinatory principles, rendering it liable to a historical decline akin to Thomistic hylomorphism. I contend that this critique overstates the degree of mystery inherent in RM. First, drawing on work by Torin Alter and Derk Pereboom (2023), I question whether RM is committed to the claim that physics captures only structural features of reality, thereby reopening the possibility that quiddities may be accessible to empirical or conceptual inquiry. Second, I situate RM within the neutral monist tradition that inspired it, showing how similar views in Ernst Mach and William James treat the fundamental constituents of reality as epistemically accessible. Finally, I revisit Bertrand Russell’s own formulation of neutral monism, arguing that it was intended primarily as a theoretical framework for situating mind and matter in nature rather than a discovery-oriented research program. These considerations suggest that Liu’s objection, while illuminating, does not decisively undermine RM’s philosophical viability.
Donovan Wishon· Asian Journal of Philosophy· 0 citations