School of Social and Political Sciences - Theses
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ItemEpistemological blind spots and the story of I: returning the vulnerable i to the rational I( 2011)In prioritising the use of the rational “I” we limit what we can know both about ourselves and about the world around us. I trace the history of the scientific revolution that turned its gaze from the Christian God and installed man (sic) as his replacement, the history and the philosophy of science that critiqued the way we use reason, postmodernism that asks why prioritise reason at all, poststructuralism that questions the very significance of language and meaning, the feminist movement that identified the rational I as a masculinist self and the New Age movement that forwarded the creation of a spiritual self amidst a modernist outlook. I explore these schools of thought so as to engage my modernist rationalist self and yours in conversations and practices, that author ways to understand, feel, be and do my body that are not necessarily condoned by my culture, the modern Western philosophical tradition, or this current moment in history. I use three autoethnographic case studies to access new ways to be, feel and do in the world that were foreign to me as a rationally situated human being. These are set in an ashram in India – to access the spiritual dimension I marginalised by turning toward science; an acting course – to access the emotional dimension I marginalised by practicing the so-called impartiality of reasonable being; and Tantric bodywork – to access my body as a site of epistemology that I marginalised by prioritising my rational mind.