>>Good God, what is going on here? Edward Gibbon: 1737-1794.
>
>Fussing about such trivial historical facts betrays your un-postmodern
>nostalgia for bad old metaphysical certainties. What does it matter if
>Gibbon was a man of the 18th or 19th century! He belonged to the same
>_episteme_! You a dupe of positivism! :)
Could this emoticon be designed to suggest that the preceding sentences are rather silly?
Do you really think, Yoshie, that the fact that Gibbon died just before the turn of what we now mark as the 19th century makes a huge difference to his significance for anyone or anything or his position on anything at all? If he'd really lived that bit longer on the stroke of new year everything would have been transformed into a Gibbon of the nineteenth century?
Of course not, I'm sure you wouldn't espouse any such thing. I'll just put the smiley face down to habit or something... a kind of tic you've developed whenever Foucault comes to mind.
Catherine