The ‘Lifeblood’ of Science and Its Politics: Interrogating Epistemic Curiosity as an Educational Aim

Abstract

Social- and virtue-epistemologies connect intellectual and moral concerns in ways significant for education and its theory. For most educationists, epistemic and ethical virtues are no longer dissociated. However, many political framings or operations of epistemic virtues and vices remain neglected in educational discourses. This article illustrates why a politicization of epistemic issues is relevant to education through reference to political performances of a curiosity typically considered educationally valuable. Curiosity bore political connotations from antiquity to late modernity whose exploration may add critical nuance to educational-philosophical conceptions of epistemic desire. This leads us to the main argument of the article, which is that such politicization helps us interrogate unqualified, uniform, and glorifying treatments of curiosity as an educational aim.

Keywords

• disinterested curiosity
• virtue epistemology
• social epistemology
• desire for knowledge
• colonialism
• epistemic restraint