Abstract

The thesis, Broken dreams: Reflections on reason, knowledge and power, undertakes a critical examination of the concept of reason. More specifically, it analyzes the features of this concept by studying how it is manifested in modern epistemological views and debates. ;Traditionally, rationality is described by a set of properties that inform the normative content of some evaluative or explanatory principles. And it is by appeal to such principles that a belief or action is rationally appraised. The appraisal is itself guaranteed by the fact that the principles are rationally apprehended in a privileged cognition. These features of rationality, translated epistemologically, dictate the twofold task of identifying the criteria of knowledge or epistemic justification, and showing that the criteria are themselves known by means of a privileged apprehension, usually interpreted as self-justifying. ;Various theories of epistemic justification are then worked through in order to see whether and how they satisfy the rational ideal in epistemology. And what is demonstrated is that the self-warranty of the knowledge of the norms of epistemic justifications amounts to little more than an unargued for presupposition in the respective theories, i.e., the attempt to satisfy the rational ideal in epistemology relies upon contingent and non-rational assumptions. ;Once the ideal of reason is seen to be contingent, and contingent in an uninformative way, then it can be abandoned in order to pursue alternative interpretations of epistemic justification which accept this contingency from the outset. The most prominent work in developing such an alternative is pursued under the mantle of naturalised epistemology. A number of tendencies within epistemological naturalism are examined, with the aim of showing the general position's assumptions. And what is finally arrived at is an analysis of knowledge and reason that implicates these notions with relations of power and control. The traditional ideal of rationality and the theoretical understanding of knowledge that it spawned are accordingly problematised