Philosophy and archaeology: an underrated relation
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2016-05-17

While many archaeologists have looked into philosophy for a deeper understanding of their discipline and philosophers have contributed to archaeological theory, e.g. Alison Wylie, Merilee Salmon, and Peter Kosso, the relationship between archaeology and philosophy remains unstructured. Disciplines like Physics and Biology count today with the help of several philosophers and archaeology could benefit from a similar type of relationship. Assuming that archaeology is an empirical discipline in that it aims at understanding phenomena, philosophy has the task of not questioning phenomena but how an understanding of phenomena is possible in the first place. With this in mind, I wish to commend the idea of interdisciplinarity but at the same time, subject it to an immanent critique. Being interdisciplinary is not a straightforward issue and the concept hides several problems. For instance, how does one mediate between two competing explanations that originate from different disciplines? Is interdisciplinarity a mere combination of disciplines or is it a combination of different types of inference?
My own research attempts to answer these questions by understanding the several ways in which we can understand how phenomena can occur. Ultimately, I believe that the issue regarding interdisciplinarity lies not in understanding the disciplines and their methods per se, but in understanding how different disciplines conceive putative objects of enquiry and the causal relations between those objects.

Artur RIBEIRO (University of Kiel, Germany)