> "Crime" is a term from jurisprudence. OK for other disciplines
> to use it. Like "law".
>
> For example, racism is a world historic crime against humanity.
thanks. you can go back to sleep now.
> Date: Fri, 29 Oct 1999 15:48:52 -0400
> From: James Farmelant <farmelantj at juno.com>
> Actually Foucault's reliance on Nietzsche was both a source
> of some of his strengths as well as some of his weaknesses.
you don't say.
> 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
'anticipate' [vt]: a special effect frequently used by academics to depict the distortions of time and space needed to transport heroic analyses between distant points in time and space when no known empirical method will suffice; sometimes regarded as 'not very special.' ant: nostalgia.
> 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
now you're discoursing on bachelard, but still not on foucault.
foucault said lots of silly stuff. only overly serious students of 'higher education' would feel much of a need to defend a guy --even a frenchman--against the 'charge' of saying silly stuff.
> Foucault's notion that the geneology or archeaology
> of human knowledge can be understood in terms
> of epistemes obviously also drew upon Bachelard.
there's very little evidence to support that (hence 'obviously'); there is, however, a great deal of evidence to support the claim that other things--say, WWII, the mutation of leninism into stal- inism, the splintering of 'histories of great men' into the work of the _annalistes_, OT1H, and structuralism, OT0H--offered quite enough motive force to get foucualt to think about what he thought about, which was the relationship between impersonal discourses and individual practice. that disparity was the thread common to his early work on madness, his methodological and philosophical meditations, his treatments of governance and the historical fas- cination with regimentation, his interests in 'sexuality' and stoicism and the 'author,' his work on the ways in which medical practice evolved from physical phenomena counterposed with modes of observation. he really didn't give a hoot about the liminal periods between epistemes.
> >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.
'implicit' [adj]: a special effect frequently used by academics as a technique to conform 'contingent phenomena'--that is, em- pirical evidence--to a formalized narrative, much as authors of fiction will use meteorological phenomena to change the setting; sometimes regarded as 'not so special.'
cheers, t