The guest of the CCIIF conferences, hosted this week by the Faculty of Philosophy, is Daian Bica. His lecture, “Empiricism as an Epistemic Attitude” will be held on Thursday, March 7, at 6 PM, in the Lucian Blaga Hall.
The abstract of the conference:
Empiricism as an Epistemic AttitudeBas van Fraassen proposes in “The Empirical Stance” a revision of empiricism in terms of epistemic attitudes. The latter constitute a bundle of different epistemic values, commitments and policies that subjects adopt with regard to the world. First, I will analyse the motivations of empiricism understood as an epistemic attitude. I will illustrate this project through the example of the character Antoine Roquentin from the novel ,,Nausea”, whom van Fraassen considers paradigmatic for understanding empiricism. Second, I will argue that van Fraassen's attempt is inextricably linked to a form of relativism that appears at the level of these attitudes. This relativism is generated by epistemological voluntarism, a thesis that would specify the means of selecting these attitudes. Van Fraassen considers that voluntarism describes the canons of human rationality. The objection was initially formulated by Anjan Chakravarrty in the article ,,Stance relativism: empiricism vs metaphysics”. My contribution will consist in generalizing this objection to the entire endeavour formulated by van Fraassen, pointing out the deficiencies of the proposed approach, as they follow from the analysed objection.