AKA Ethico-onto-epistem-ology
The notion of “ethico-onto-epistem-ology” was first coined by physicist-philosopher Karen Barad to point at the inseparability of ethics, ontology and epistemology when engaging in (scientific) knowledge production, with scientific practices, and with the world itself and its inhabitants – human and non-human beings that intra-actively co-constitute the world.
It is this radically reworked model of ethical mattering of the world, of ethico-onto-epistem-ology, in which not responsibility but the more relational attitude of “response-ability” towards all of our fellow beings, becomes key.
The agential realist version of response-ability at the same time moves beyond responding to the human Other’s call and relates to an instantaneous accountability that all beings share in their intra-actions with the world, as we are all in and part of the world’s becoming – a becoming that, for Barad, in the end, is a matter of morality. This is truly “an ethics of worlding” that starts from a relational, situated and embodied model of (inter)subjectivity, and that reveals how ethics, being, and knowing no longer can be separated.