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Mats Rosengren
Author · 1 book

Mats Rosenberg is a Swedish philosopher, translator and Professor in rhetoric and the Uppsala University. Since October 1, 2014, Rosengren holds the chair of Rhetoric at the Department of Literature. He is a member of the editorial board of Glänta and of the board of the Swedish Ernst Cassirer Society. His main interests lie in the fields of theory and history of rhetoric, epistemology and theory of science, French philosophy, cave art and artistic research. He has written on Plato, Montaigne, Chaim Perelman, Cornelius Castoriadis, Ernst Cassirer and Gilles Deleuze. Rosengren’s latest major work is a study focusing on the discovery of paleolithic cave art and the development of the discipline cave 'art studies', seen from a doxological perspective: Cave Art, Perception and Knowledge (Palgrave Macmillan 2012). For the moment he is working on a book on Cornelius Castoriadis' philosophy. Rosengren is also a translator, mainly of French philosophy, and an editor, most notably of the now completed Logos/Pathos series at Glänta Produktion. Doxology – a rhetorical approach to epistemology Since 2002 Rosengren has been working on developing an 'other' take on epistemology. He has chosen to call his epistemic stance doxological in order to emphasise that all knowledge is doxic knowledge, thus turning the seminal Platonic distinction between doxa (beliefs, opinions) and episteme (objective, eternal knowledge) upside down. Protagoras dictum advocating man as the measure of all things is, perhaps, the most poignant expression of a doxological position, stating explicitly that no apprehension escapes the human-related conditions of knowledge alluded to in Protagoras' fragment. Departing from the pivotal question "What would a Protagorean position imply for epistemology today?", Rosengren develops a critique of the purely discursive notion of knowledge, still central in Anglo-Saxon epistemology. He emphasizes the fact that our knowledge is always embodied, in ourselves as biological beings as well as formulated and/or preserved in some language, institution or ritual; practiced and upheld by one or many individuals, always in one historical moment or other and within the admittedly diffuse framework of an ever changing but still specific social situation. Doxology is not a relativism abandoning all claims to objectivity or science – far from it – but an attempt, in the wake of the serious and fundamental criticisms of the late 20th century, to readdress and reconsider what knowledge, science and objectivity could be today. Nor is doxology a teaching about apparent or illusory knowledge, but about situated, variable and interested knowledge. In short it is a teaching about how we actually do create the knowledge that we need – in science as well as in life. In his publications on doxology Rosengen has tried to formulate and develop a concept of knowledge taking heed of all these factors. First introduced in 2002, this concept, doxology, has now become wildly used within the social and human sciences in Scandinavia.

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Mats Rosengren