Epistemologi dasar: pengantar filfasat pengetahuan [Basic Epistemology: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Knowledge]

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Notes

¹ Published monograph-length works written by Indonesian STS scholars that I am aware of are Merlyna Lim’s @rchipelago Online: the Internet and Political Activism in Indonesia (2005), which is her finished dissertation completed at the University of Twente, and Sulfikar Amir’s The Technological State in Indonesia: The Co-constitution of High Technology and Authoritarian Politics (2012), which I previously reviewed for this journal. Of course, non-Indonesian scholars have also produced STS-informed books about the Netherlands East Indies (how Indonesia was known when it was a Dutch colony) and about postindependence Indonesia. These include Rudolf Mrazek’s Engineers of Happy Land (2002), Suzanne Moon’s Technology and Ethical Idealism (2007), Andrew Goss’s The Floracrats (2011), Vivek Neelakantan’s Science, Public Health and Nation-Building in Soekarno-Era Indonesia (2017), and most recently Hans Pols’ Nurturing Indonesia (2018).

² The copy that I have was in its ninth printing in 2010, and copies of the book are still being sold on an Indonesian online retail store (www.bukalapak.com).

³ Institut Keguruan dan Ilmu Pendidikan Sanata Dharma was transformed into a university in 1993. Now it is called Sanata Dharma University. It is a Jesuit university in the city of Yogyakarta, Indonesia.

⁴ The author claims in the introduction that, even though there was another book written on the same subject by P. H. Hardono, which was a selective translation of Kenneth T. Gallagher’s The Philosophy of Knowledge (1988), his book was not meant to replace it. Rather, he wrote, it was meant to complement it. Even the materials for his own book, Sudarminta freely admitted, are not fully his own. Much of what he wrote for chapters 3 through 8 is drawn from Vincent G. Potter’s On Understanding Understanding: A Philosophy of Knowledge (1994), and chapter 11 from chapter 9 of Robert Audi’s Epistemology: A Contemporary Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge (1988). Many Indonesian textbooks written by Indonesian scholars are typically of this mold. Realizing that there is a lack of good Indonesian books to use in their courses, many instructors set about to write ones on their own by translating and synthesizing important and influential texts in their fields.

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Anto Mohsin

Anto Mohsin is an assistant professor in residence of STS in the Liberal Arts Program at Northwestern University in Qatar (NU-Q). One of the courses he offers at NU-Q is an introduction to STS in which he teaches science and its ways of knowing. He is currently working on his book manuscript on the sociopolitical history of electrification in postindependence Indonesia. The manuscript, tentatively titled “Electrifying Indonesia: Electricity, Nation-Building, and Development after World War II,” examines the role electricity and electrification play in the making and maintenance of Indonesia’s nationhood and in the discourse, practices, and consequences of its national development project.