Year: 2020
Type: article
Abstract: It has become commonplace to attest that the past few years have been marked by a wide-ranging epistemic crisis.Not least since January 2017, when then Counselor to the U.S. President Kellyanne Conway referred to "alternative facts" regarding the size of the crowd at Donald Trump's inauguration, scholars in the fields of philosophy, media studies, and American cultural and literary studies have reoriented their research agendas towards analyzing and potentially dissolving that crisis.Concerns about "truth," "reality," "factivity," and "facticity" have unabatedly gained an agenda-setting role beyond academic discourse, extending into the fields of art, literature, journalism, and politics.The validity and impact of these concepts determine a wide range of current discussions inside and outside academia, and they draw attention to the cultural and philosophical history of those ideas.The vilification of respectable journalism as fake news is taken to erode the foundations of democratic societies, and belief in 'truthful representation' in the media, art, film, and literature becomes more and more conspicuous.Many scholars, public intellectuals, commentators, and politicians argue that we may indeed have come to live in a "post-factual" age, i.e. an age of "post-truth" (Alloa; McIntyre).So, when tackling the issues of reality and what is factually "real" and "true," are we (still) doing so with the goal to validate some sort of factual or existential truth, or are we already launching our inquiry from a perspective that is grounded in a world 'after truths' invested in the production of affects and emotions rather than facts?This special issue emerges from these and other related questions that currently concern the fields of philosophy, literary studies, media studies, and cultural studies.
DOI: 10.4000/ejas.15581
Authors: Dustin Breitenwischer, Tobias Keiling
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W3022115131