Sasha Mudd

In this article, we examine the ways in which the notion of interdisciplinarity was understood, implemented and experienced by researchers at a government-funded Chilean climate research centre. Our multi-site ethnography, consisting of interviews, participant observations, and document analysis, was motivated by three key aims. First, to generate an inductive, multi-faceted picture of the lived meaning of “interdisciplina” at the Centre; second, to explore whether and to what extent the “peripheral” features of the research context would exacerbate the challenges associated with practicing interdisciplinarity, and third, to see whether frictions between disciplines at the Centre could be considered productive “dissonances” in Stark’s sense of the term. We found that despite the centre efforts to produce a common framework to regulate interdisciplinary research, its researchers nevertheless understood, enacted and experienced it in diverse ways. More specifically, we found that researcher´s conceptions of interdisciplinarity were coloured by their lived experiences of attempting to practice it, and in particular by the benefits and costs they associated with doing so. This in turn was linked to several variables, including the specific balance between disciplines, the absence or presence of shared, clearly-defined goals, the affirmation of a common research ethic or motivational commitment, and the structural-material conditions of the research in question. We also found that the research conditions characteristic of the Global South do tend to exacerbate the well-documented challenges associated with interdisciplinarity, yet that the adversities associated with precarious conditions were often met by increased resilience and bonding among researchers, who use creative and collaborative strategies to adapt to adversity.

Catherine Elgin proposes a novel principle for identifying epistemic virtue. Based loosely on Kant’s Categorical Imperative, it identifies autonomy as our fundamental epistemic responsibility, and defines the epistemic virtues as those traits of character needed to exercise epistemic autonomy. I argue that Elgin’s principle fails as a criterion of epistemic virtue because the instrumental conception of autonomy on which it relies leads to an untenable relativism. Despite this, I suggest that autonomy may yet furnish a plausible criterion for epistemic virtue, provided we construe autonomy as Kant does, as grounded in categorical rather than instrumental reason

Throughout the critical period Kant enigmatically insists that reason is a ‘unity’, thereby suggesting that both our theoretical and practical endeavors are grounded in one and the same rational capacity. How Kant's unity thesis ought to be interpreted and whether it can be substantiated remain sources of controversy in the literature. According to the strong reading of this claim, reason is a ‘unity’ because all our reasoning, including our theoretical reasoning, functions practically. Although several prominent commentators endorse this view, it is widely thought to lack exegetical support. This paper seeks to strengthen the case for this reading by showing how theoretical reason's positive function, as Kant presents it in the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic, may be construed as fundamentally practical. I argue that reason's supreme regulative principle ought to be understood as a categorical practical imperative. This interpretation, I suggest, resolves the apparent inconsistencies that blight Kant's account of the principle in the Appendix, while bringing greater overall coherence to his account of theoretical reason's regulative function