Title Promoter Affiliations Abstract "A Thousand Knots" "Wendy Morris" "Art History, Leuven" "We are surrounded by traces of the past, a veritable garden of ghosts. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, 2017. In my garden, colonial legacies reside in the hydrangeas and japonicas. They were originally brought back from Japan by Philipp Franz von Siebold who worked for the Dutch East India Company. An Acanthus mollis, whose leaves characterise Corinthian columns, continues to spread through a network of subterranean rhizomes. Abortifacients, such as Bishop’s weed, artemisia, and woodruff, are present too. These, amongst other plants, connect my allotment to once clandestine knowledge amongst midwives and witches. And a conifer, now struggling to thrive, reflects the impact of climate change. This body of research proposes a close reading of my small urban garden to excavate stories, histories, and knowledge embedded within a relatively few square meters of soil. By combining experimental forms of online writing and mixed media, the past, present, and potential futures will be interwoven. Driving the research are these questions: how might each narrative node, or knot, offer a transhistorical perspective into this unassuming plot of land, is it possible to represent the site in its densities of entanglement, what is my position as a narrator, woman, artist and gardener embedded and invested in this landscape, and finally, if my garden no longer exists due to encroaching urban sprawl, how might this work bear witness to what has been lost? Overarching the project as a whole is the question: if one can address the environmental ecologies of a particular place, can one also attest to the presence of narrative ecologies?" "When To Trust Authoritative Testimony: Generation And Transmission Of Knowledge In Saadya Gaon, Al-Ghazālī, And Thomas Aquinas" "Richard Taylor, Andrea Robiglio" "De Wulf-Mansion Centre for Ancient, Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy" "People have become suspicious of authority, including epistemic authorities, i.e., knowledge experts, even on matters individuals are unqualified to adjudicate (e.g., climate change, vaccines, or the shape and age of the earth). This is problematic since most of our knowledge comes from trusting a speaker—whether scholars reading experts, students listening to teachers, children obeying their parents, or pedestrians inquiring of strangers—such that the knowledge transmitted is rarely personally verified. Despite the recent development of social epistemology and theories of testimony, this is not a new problem.Ancient and Medieval philosophers largely took it for granted that most human knowledge primarily comes from listening to a trustworthy speaker whose virtuous character serves to mitigate against the twin concerns of inaccuracy and dishonesty. Thus, unlike contemporary Social Epistemology, few testimonial theories were explicitly laid out despite the crucial role testimony plays throughout a wide range of topics and teachings. To date, the working theory of testimony underpinning the works of medieval philosophers are just now being codified. This is particularly relevant for the Abrahamic faiths since they originate with testimony from God himself. The goal of this dissertation is to explore how the generation and transmission of religious knowledge (i.e., testimonial theory) appears in an exemplary thinker from each faith: Saadya (Sa'adiah) Gaon of Judaism (882-942), al-Ghazālī of Islam (1058-1111), and Thomas Aquinas of Christianity (1225-1274). While not contemporaries, these exemplars are theological philosophers who are like-minded in their desire to maintain an orthodox faith while possessing philosophical approaches to truth. Thus, they maintained sophisticated epistemological theories of generation and transmission within their own religious contexts (e.g., revelation, scripture, and prophecy).Cataloguing these medieval testimonial theories reveals a historical incongruity with the current contemporary concept of testimony and its frameworks. Based on the testimonial theories of these three thinkers, I argue for a ""transhistorical"" concept of testimony that does not presume an evidentialist framework to account for pre-modern theories of testimony which predominantly rely on virtue theoretic frameworks. To test the proposed neutral framework, I offer a virtue epistemological account of testimony in which trust is not an intellectual virtue, but the intellectual aspect of the historic virtue of autonomy. I argue that intellectual autonomy and trust are inversely related in one's interactions with authority (both practical and theoretical)."