recent posts
- (Very) Early Foucault on Humanism, Part 4: Kant, Anthropology, and Departing from Heidegger
- (Very) Early Foucault on Humanism, Part 3: Heidegger and Foucault on Kant
- AI Literacy Paper
- (Very) Early Foucault on Humanism, Part 2: Heidegger?
- (Very) Early Foucault on Humanism, Part 1: From Order back to Lille
about
Category: Gordon Hull
-
Thomas Frank has a nice analysis up on Salon.com on college tuition and debts. In it, he points out that the crisis is of long duration, and people have been asking for more than a generation when the “college bubble” will burst. Along the way, he shows that a number of standard explanations (overpaid professors,…
-
An important and somewhat neglected topic is what happens when biopolitics intersects with juridical power in courts of law. Today, we got a good example of one way it can happen. Several years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that states could not execute the “intellectually disabled.” They also let the states decide what that meant. …
-
A few days ago, the Federal Court of Appeals issued a decision denying patentability to Dolly the Sheep. Dolly, as one will recall, was the first successful mammalian clone from an adult somatic cell. Essentially, researchers at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh took an unfertilized donor egg, replaced the nucleus with one taken from a…
-
Biopolitics – even when understood in its narrow sense of life itself being a political issue – comes in at least two different strands. The first, which historically precedes the second, was concerned with what Foucault called a “politics of public health.” In so doing, it takes on standard biopolitical issues of population optimization, public…
-
Gary Becker, the Nobel laureate economist at the University of Chicago, has died. Becker is perhaps best known for "human capital" theory, which talks about how one might, for example, come to think of education as an investment in one's future earnings. As the absolute normalcy of a statement like this would suggest, I think…
-
A few days ago, I used the lack of historical figures in its top-20-pernicious list to propose that Leiter’s poll about pernicious philosophers said a lot about the politics of academic philosophy, and not so much about anything else. “Pernicious,” in other words, is a political designation. In the comments, Jon Cogburn wonders: “You had…
-
There’s a discussion going on over at Leiter about the results of his latest poll: which modern philosopher had the “most pernicious influence” on philosophy? Heidegger was the strong #1, both in terms of the number of people who hated him, and the intensity of their hatred. This doesn’t seem that surprising, given that Leiter’s…
-
The Supreme Court today heard oral arguments in the Hobby Lobby case, in which the craft store chain is suing for exemption from the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate. According to Hobby Lobby, it has religious objections to certain forms of contraception, and so should be exempt from the mandate on First Amendment grounds. According…
New APPS 