I have been working through (part 1, part 2, part 3) some of what Foucault says about anthropology in his 1954-5 course at Lille, recently published as La question anthropologique.  Last time, I focused on (1) Heidegger’s reading of Kant and (2) contrasted that with Foucault’s.  Here, I’ll track how Foucault connects his Kant reading…

I have been working through (part 1, part 2) some of what Foucault says about anthropology in his 1954-5 course at Lille, recently published as La question anthropologique.  In particular, Foucault’s course pays careful attention to Feuerbach, a figure who is notably absent by the time of Order of Things.  Where does the emphasis come…

Late last fall, an interdisciplinary group at UNC Charlotte that included me put together a position paper on AI literacy. The goal is to push back against the tendency to treat AI literacy as skills development, and to create space for human agency in using (or not using!) AI. As universities rush headlong to develop…

Last time, I setup a question about Foucault’s anti-humanism.  His comments in Order of Things are famous, and the recent publication of a 1954-5 lecture course he delivered at Lille as La question anthropologique offers a chance to think about the evolution of his thought on the subject.  One clue that something is different is…

Foucault published Madness and Civilization in 1961; before that, there was relatively little published work, and his early career work of the 1950s has been neglected until quite recently.  Some of it is starting to appear, in particular work that he did at the University of Lille: two manuscripts: one on Binswanger and Existential Analysis…

Last time, I looked at Derrida’s Gift of Death to understand the logic of sacrifice there.  Briefly, the decision to do one thing involves sacrificing all of the other thing one could do.  So when I choose to feed this cat, I sacrifice all the other cats.  My ethics are impeccable, but the decision to…

There’s starting to be a good bit of productive “continental” work on Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT.  In particular, there’s emerging work that takes on LLMs from the point of view of language.  I’ve said a lot about the usefulness of Derrida for understanding LLMs, generally through the lens of Derrida’s discussion of Platonism. …

Leif Weatherby does not care for Derrida.  At least, in Language Machines (see here for a synopsis/initial take on this important book) he suggests that Derrida’s (mis)reading of Saussure is a significant part of “how the humanities lost language, allowing both cognitive science and NLP to update analytical and technological approaches that literary theory rarely…

Last time, I talked about Leif Weatherby’s fantastic Language Machines (for my initial synopsis and thoughts on the book, see here) and his identification of a Kantian problematic behind what he calls the syntax view of language, which is prominently associated with Chomsky.  Although Chomsky called his book Cartesian Linguistics, Weatherby thinks the better reference…