On Thu, 28 Oct 1999 23:07:58 -0400 t byfield <tbyfield at panix.com> writes:
>
>this reminds me quite a bit of sahlins's critique of foucault, which--
>i quote from memory, but i'm not tinkering--casts him as hobbesian and
>says that 'they were both bald, except for one of them.'
That was good for at least a couple of laughs.
>
>the truth, if there is one, isn't a chi-chi international gourmet shop
>where one walks down the aisles and picks and chooses this german then
>compares his weight and price with an 'equivalent' german or
>frenchman.
>this 'method' is the kind of sausage produced in academia, where a
>two-
>step prevails: a fanatical insistence on historical determination read
>as 'limitations' rules until we suddenly do the star-trekky hyperspace
>zoom into a world of theory, where suddenly everything works different
>and the pursuit of truth is just that, circumstances be damned.
>
>thus we find that foucault's big failing was his (tsk tsk) reliance on
>nietzsche, whereas kuhn--who we invoke as a sort of dead buddy needing
>to be hauled off the battlefield--needs no origins at all because he's
>a rhetorical foil.
Actually Foucault's reliance on Nietzsche was both a source of some of his strengths as well as some of his weaknesses. Actually, the comparison between Foucault and Kuhn seems apt to me given the influence of Gaston Bachelard's philosophy of science on Foucault. Bachelard had already anticipated some of the themes that Kuhn would later popularize years later. Bachelard argued that the development of modern science could not be adquately understood in terms of the prevailing empiricist or positivist epistemologies. He made that rather clear in his paper on the development of relativity that appears in the Schilp volumes on *Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist*. In fact in this paper "The Philosophic Dialectic of the Concepts of Relativity" he presneted his thesis that science develops by means of scientific revolutions involving what he called "epistemological shocks." He saw the revolution that Einstein's physics had wrought as requiring changes in our philosophies of nature. For Bachelard this revolution requires a philosophical revolution in which the double philosophy of the experience of space (realism and Kantian philosophy) would have to be replaced by a dialectical philosophy of space which would prove to be a critical philosophy more subtle than Kant's was in repsect to Newtonian mechanics. Such a philosophy would reconcile rationalism with realism.
Bachelard's notion of "epsitemological shocks" became quite influential in French thought. Bachelard's student, the Marxist philosopher, Louis Althusser, applied this notion to the analysis of Marx's texts. He argued that Marx's thought developed from an early Feurbachian humanism to a science of history via what Althusser called an "epistemological rupture." Likewise, Foucault's notion that the geneology or archeaology of human knowledge can be understood in terms of epistemes obviously also drew upon Bachelard.
>
>the foucault you summarize doesn't sound much like any foucault i ever
>read, which is a lot; rather, it does sound quite a bit like a cliff's
>notes premasticated and precritiqued version.
Do you think that I can get a gig with the people who put out Cliff Notes, or perhaps I can do a "Pomo for Dummies" book?
> for a proponent of
>radic-
>ally relativistic epistemology, he sure as hell didn't spend much time
>theorizing the liminal regions between epistemes. *au contraire*: most
>of his work was devoted to--and he was savagely criticized for it--the
>ABSOLUTE and INTEGRAL logic of the epistemes he wrote about.
I would think that this was implicit in his whole approach even if he didn't discuss it very much. Kuhn by the way did draw lots of fire on the grounds that his analysis of paradigms and scientific revolutions implied a radical relativist epistemology.
Jim F.
>
>cheers,
>t
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