Civil activism in the field of science is one of the most crucial issues and the key factor of autonomy of science. Herewith, the position of universities and other scientific institutions is vulnerable and hinges upon state and private financing. Science finds itself between two unattractive and doubtful prospects of developing in either bureaucratic or corporate (in the business sense) way, which leads to the abridgement of basic academic freedoms. Setting the problem of professional expertise and mediation is highly important (...) for the definition of borders and consolidation of the position of science. (shrink)

The following article discovers current trends of contemporary epistemology, related to epistemic agent and his/her activities. A number of issues raised here describe internal experience of the agent, such as (in)voluntary nature of belief formation, trust in one’s faculties of perception, correspondence of formed beliefs to evidence, demarcation between purely epistemic and pragmatic rationality. Another part of the issues is related to external experiences of the agent. The most crucial among them are: blameworthiness of the agent’s belief system, limited intake (...) of testimonial knowledge as a result of social bias; epistemic disagreement and “epistemic peers” as the sources of knowledge or additional pressure from the environment. The author considers virtue epistemology as a new way of performing normativity. (shrink)