foucault? relativist? ROTFL!

Charles Brown CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us
Fri Oct 29 13:11:23 PDT 1999



>>> James Farmelant <farmelantj at juno.com> 10/29/99 03:48PM >>>
>
>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.

(((((((((

Charles: Sahlins was always a card in class. Wonder where that critique of Foucault is .


>
>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.

Jim 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?

Charles: That's Pomo for Beginners , Jim.


> 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.

((((((((((((((

Charles: What I am not quite clear on is whether Einstein had a relativist epistemology underlying his Relativity. Did General Relativity derelativise things ?

CB



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