Warren Montag - Althusser and His Contemporaries - Duke University Press, Usa, 2013

• Warren Montag

  
  

  Althusser and His Contemporaries: Philosophy's Perpetual War

  
  

  Duke University Press 2013

• Description

  Althusser and His Contemporaries alters and expands understanding of Louis Althusser and French philosophy of the 1960s and 1970s. Thousands of pages of previously unpublished work from different periods of Althusser's career have been made available in French since his death in 1990. Based on meticulous study of the philosopher's posthumous publications, as well as his unpublished manuscripts, lecture notes, letters, and marginalia, Warren Montag provides a thoroughgoing reevaluation of Althusser's philosophical project. Montag shows that the theorist was intensely engaged with the work of his contemporaries, particularly Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, and Lacan. Examining Althusser's philosophy as a series of encounters with his peers' thought, Montag contends that Althusser's major philosophical confrontations revolved around three themes: structure, subject, and beginnings and endings. Reading Althusser reading his contemporaries, Montag sheds new light on structuralism, poststructuralism, and the extraordinary moment of French thought in the 1960s and 1970s.

  About The Author(s)

  Warren Montag is the Brown Family Professor in Literature, English and Comparative Literary Studies at Occidental College in Los Angeles. He is the author of Louis Althusser;Bodies, Masses, Power: Spinoza and His Contemporaries; and The Unthinkable Swift. He is editor of Décalages: A Journal of Althusser Studies.

Michel Foucault et les religions

Appel

Colloque International

« Foucault et les religions »

IRCM – UNIL Lausanne

Avec le soutien de l’Association pour le Centre Michel Foucault.

Proposition de date : 22, 23, 24 octobre 2014

Le texte de présentation de l’appel (en français et en anglais) est en pièce attaché.

Les personnes intéressées à présenter une communication dans le cadre de ce colloque sont invitées à nous adresser un titre, un bref résumé de leur contribution (ca. 300 mots), en précisant leur fonction ainsi que leur affiliation institutionnelle, en anglais ou en français, jusqu’au 15 novembre 2013.

Proposition à envoyer à Jean-François Bert : Jean-Francois.Bert@unil.ch

Comité scientifique incluant le comité d’organisation :

Julien Cavagnis ; Jean-François Bert ; Philippe Artières ; Frédéric Gros ; Christian Grosse ; Nicolas Meylan ; Luca Paltrinieri : Philippe Chevallier.

Documents joints

• Document (PDF – 118.1 ko)

La Volonté de savoir de Michel Foucault. Regards critiques 1976-1979
coédition PUC - IMEC, 2013

Textes choisis, présentés et traduits par Philippe Artières, Jean-François Bert, Philippe Chevallier, Frédéric Gros, Florian Nicodème, Luca Paltrinieri, Mathieu Potte-Bonneville, Ariane Revel, Judith Revel, Martin Saar, Michel Senellart, Ferhat Taylan.

Collection Regards critiques.

C’est avec La Volonté de savoir (1976) que Michel Foucault entame le projet d’écrire une histoire de la sexualité. Ce premier volume, court, incisif, programmatique, traite d’un sujet hautement polémique dans la société française de l’après-1968 où l’émancipation sexuelle apparaît alors comme l’ultime et décisif combat. Comment, depuis le XIIe siècle, la sexualité est-elle devenue dans nos sociétés occidentales un enjeu de pouvoir, mais aussi un instrument de subjectivation ? C’est par un détour historique que Foucault en arrivera à remettre en cause l’idée de l’hypothèse répressive et son corollaire, celle de la libération du sexe. L’Occident, loin d’avoir censuré la sexualité, l’a inventée de toutes pièces. La réception de l’ouvrage porte la trace de ce questionnement du philosophe : sexe et politique, identité sexuelle, plaisir et désir, construction du genre, dispositif de sexualité… voici quelques-uns des thèmes qui sont mis en avant dans les très nombreuses lectures, venant aussi bien de théoriciens que de militants qui ont suivi la publication de l’ouvrage. Un livre de Foucault qui, comme les autres, est venu heurter les schémas de pensée qui avaient jusque-là dominé les analyses de la sexualité et les luttes de libération sexuelle.

Jonathan Beever, Nicolae C. Morar (Eds.) - Bioethics, Science and Public Policy - Purdue University Press, Usa, 2013

Jonathan Beever -

Nicolae C. Morar

Perspectives in Bioethics, Science and Public Policy

Purdue University Press 2013

Book Description

In this book, nine thought-leaders engage with some of the hottest moral issues in science and ethics. Based on talks originally given at the annual “Purdue Lectures in Ethics, Policy, and Science,” the chapters explore interconnections between the three areas in an engaging and accessible way. Addressing a mixed public audience, the authors go beyond dry theory to explore some of the difficult moral questions that face scientists and policy-makers every day.

The introduction presents a theoretical framework for the book, defining the term “bioethics” as extending well beyond human well-being to wider relations between humans, nonhuman animals, the environment, and biotechnologies. Three sections then explore the complex relationship between moral value, scientific knowledge, and policy making. The first section starts with thoughts on nonhuman animal pain and moves to a discussion of animal understanding. The second section explores climate change and the impact of “green” nanotechnology on environmental concerns. The final section begins with dialog about ethical issues in nanotechnology, moves to an exploration of bio-banks (a technology with broad potential medical and environmental impact), and ends with a survey of the impact of biotechnologies on (synthetic) life itself.

Contents: Part 1: Animals: Moral agency, moral considerability, and consciousness (Daniel Kelly) and From minds to minding (Mark Bernstein); Animal Pain: What is it and why does it matter? (Bernard Rollin). Part 2: Environment: The future of environmental ethics (Holmes Rolston III); Climate change, human rights, and the trillionth ton of carbon (Henry Shue); Ethics, environment, and nanotechnology (Barbara Karn). Part 3: Biotechnologies: Nanotechnologies: Science and society (James Leary); Ethical issues in constructing and using bio-banks (Eric Meslin); Synthetic life: A new industrial revolution (Gregory Kaebnick). 

About the Editor(s):

Jonathan Beever

Jonathan Beever co-founded the Purdue Lectures in Ethics, Policy, and Science at Purdue University. Beever receives his doctorate from Purdue in December 2012. His primary research in philosophy focuses on applied ethics, science, and bioethics, but also he works in continental philosophy, political and moral philosophy, and semiotics. Beever has published on several interrelated topics concerning semiotics, environmental value, biotechnological risk, and bioethics.

Nicolae C. Morar

Morar is a 2011-2012 Faculty Fellow in the Department of Philosophy and in the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Oregon. He recently received his doctoral degree from Purdue University with a thesis analyzing the ways in which current biotechnologies are altering traditional conceptions of human nature. He is also coediting a book with V. Cisney on New Directions in Biopower: Ethics and Politics in the Twenty-First Century.

Foucault and Technology

History and Technology: An International Journal Volume 29, Issue 1, 2013

Michael C. Behrent

Foucault and Technology

pages 54-104

Abstract

This article offers the first comprehensive analysis of the ways in which the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) employed the terms ‘technology’ and the ‘technique’ over the course of his intellectual career. His use of these words in his mature writings, it is argued, reflects a profound ambivalence: Foucault sought to denounce the pernicious effects of what he called modern ‘technologies of power,’ but also deliberately evoked the more positive values associated with ‘technology’ to develop a philosophical standpoint shorn of the ‘humanist’ values he associated with existentialism and phenomenology. The article situates Foucault’s condemnation of power technologies within the broader skepticism towards ‘technological society’ that pervaded French intellectual circles following World War II. In the first phase of his career (1954-1960), Foucault built on these attitudes to articulate a conventional critique of technology’s alienating effects. Between 1961 and 1972, the theme of ‘technology’ fell into abeyance in his work, though he often suggested a connection between the rise of technology and the advent of the ‘human sciences.’ Between 1973 and 1979, ‘technology’ became a keyword in Foucault’s lexicon, notably when he coined the phrase ‘technologies of power’. He continued to use the term in the final stage of his career (1980-1984), when his emphasis shifted from power to ‘technologies of the self.’ The essay concludes by addressing Paul Forman’s thesis on the primacy of science in modernity and of technology in modernity, suggesting that in many respects Foucault is more of a modernist than a postmodernist.

The cyberpolitics of the governed

Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Volume 14, Issue 2, 2013

Shih-Diing Liu

The cyberpolitics of the governed

pages 252-271

Abstract

How do governed postcolonial subjects perform resistance in the age of the internet? What are their oppositional practices, networks and creativity? This paper offers an empirical analysis of the emerging network politics in Macau, the former colony of Portugal whose sovereignty was returned to China in 1999, by focusing on netizens' engagement with the postcolonial governance. This research considers “government” as consisting of not only power but freedom. It starts with an interest in the “failure” of the government—that is, how the new regime, which attempts to insert the postcolonial subject into a new power structure, actually fails to produce a completely uniform and obedient subjectivity. Instead, its rule is saturated with a multiplicity of “netwars” which take advantage of the opportunities and resources offered by the new media environment. The network struggle, which is not unified under any single authority, enables a segment of the governed population to do politics and constitute subjectivity otherwise. In particular, I illustrate how egao, which opens official icons of the administration to negotiation and contestation, allows the governed to make their own political statements. The postcolonial cyberpolitics is simultaneously agonistic and playful, expressing what Foucault calls the refusal “to be ruled in such manners”, or the desire for alternative mode of governing.

Shih-Diing Liu has taught at the University of Macau since 2003. His recent publications appear in Taiwan: A Radical Quarterly in Social Studies, Si-xiang, positions: asia critique, Asian Politics and Policy, Mass Communication Research, and New Left Review. He is now preparing a book on “affective sovereignty”.

Suzanne Verderber - The Medieval Fold. Power, Repression, and the Emergence of the Individual @ Palgrave Macmillan, Uk, 20 May 2013

Striking cultural developments took place in the twelfth century which led to what historians have termed 'the emergence of the individual.' The Medieval Fold demonstrates how cultural developments typically associated with this twelfth-century renaissance—autobiography, lyric, courtly love, romance—can be traced to the Church's cultivation of individualism. However, subjects did not submit to pastoral power passively, they constructed fantasies and behaviors, redeploying or 'folding' it to create new forms of life and culture. Incorporating the work of Nietzsche, Foucault, Lacan, and Deleuze, Suzanne Verderber presents a model of the subject in which the opposition between interior self and external world is dislodged.

Contents:
Introduction
1. The Gregorian Reform, Pastoral Power, and Subjection
2. The Courtly Fold: The Subjectivation of Pastoral Power and the Invention of Modern Eroticism
3. Chrétien de Troyes' Diagram of Power: Perceval
Conclusion 

Suzanne Verderber is Associate Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute, USA. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania, USA. She has authored articles on Hieronymus Bosch, Marie de France, and Michel de Montaigne, and has translated two books, Jean-Michel Rabaté's The Ethics of the Lie and Charles Enderlin's The Lost Years: Radical Islam, Intifada, and Wars in the Middle East, 2001–2006.

Read more

Mark Kelly - Michel Foucault’s Political Thought @ Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Mark Kelly - Michel Foucault’s Political Thought 
@ Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

The work of twentieth-century French philosopher Michel Foucault has increasingly influenced the study of politics. This influence has mainly been via concepts he developed in particular historical studies that have been taken up as analytical tools; “governmentality” and ”biopower” are the most prominent of these. More broadly, Foucault developed a radical new conception of social power as forming strategies embodying intentions of their own, above those of individuals engaged in them; individuals for Foucault are as much products of as participants in games of power.

The question of Foucault’s overall political stance remains hotly contested. Scholars disagree both on the level of consistency of his position over his career, and the particular position he could be said to have taken at any particular time. This dispute is common both to scholars critical of Foucault and to those who are sympathetic to his thought.

What can be generally agreed about Foucault is that he had a radically new approach to political questions, and that novel accounts of power and subjectivity were at its heart. Critics dispute not so much the novelty of his views as their coherence. Some critics see Foucault as effectively belonging to the political right because of his rejection of traditional left-liberal conceptions of freedom and justice. Some of his defenders, by contrast, argue for compatibility between Foucault and liberalism. Other defenders see him either as a left-wing revolutionary thinker, or as going beyond traditional political categories.

To summarize Foucault’s thought from an objective point of view, his political works would all seem to have two things in common: (1) an historical perspective, studying social phenomena in historical contexts, focusing on the way they have changed throughout history; (2) a discursive methodology, with the study of texts, particularly academic texts, being the raw material for his inquiries. As such the general political import of Foucault’s thought across its various turns is to understand how the historical formation of discourses have shaped the political thinking and political institutions we have today.

Foucault’s thought was overtly political during one phase of his career, coinciding exactly with the decade of the 1970s, and corresponding to a methodology he designated “genealogy”. It is during this period that, alongside the study of discourses, he analysed power as such in its historical permutations. Most of this article is devoted to this period of Foucault’s work. Prior to this, during the 1960s, the political content of his thought was relatively muted, and the political implications of that thought are contested. So, this article is divided into thematic sections arranged in order of the chronology of their appearance in Foucault’s thought.

Table of Contents

•   Foucault’s Early Marxism

•   Archaeology

•   Genealogy

•   Discipline

•   Sexuality

•   Power

•   Biopower

•   Governmentality

•   Ethics

•   References and Further Reading

                        Primary

                        Secondary

.

(......)

Read more @ IEP

Michael A. Taylor: American psychiatry is morally challenged

American psychiatry is morally challenged

By Michael A. Taylor

The fundamental problem with American psychiatry is American psychiatrists. It seems every few months there’s fresh news about some well-known academic psychiatrist paid boatloads to endorse a new treatment that doesn’t work—or worse—causes harm. Among the 394 US physicians in 2010 who received over $100,000 from the pharmaceutical industry, 116 were psychiatrists, well out of proportion of the percentage of psychiatrists in medical practice. The American Psychiatric Association is also heavily supported by the drug industry. Its annual meetings, once efforts to educate members, are now basically week-long infomercials for Big Pharma. This influence has seeped into clinical trials as well, where study design is carefully manipulated by industry representatives to favor their new product. In turn, companies analyze their data out of view of academics, sequestering data unfavorable to their product, and ghostwriting journal articles for academics.

In similar fashion, fancy devices have been introduced with claims of wondrous benefits, none of which have materialized. Light-emitting boxes, for example, were supposed to be the next great psychiatric advent to prevent winter depressions, but the evidence for this claim is still weak. Similarly, vagal nerve stimulation (an implanted electronic pacer in the chest with electrodes attached to a nerve in the neck) was supposed to relieve treatment-resistant depressions. Yet it offers no demonstrated benefit and costs the poor soul subjected to it about $20,000 out of pocket. Transcranial magnetic stimulation, a ring-shaped magnet that delivers a magnetic pulse to the head, was going to replace electroconvulsive therapy. At best it has a placebo effect. And yet, these treatments continue because of their support by psychiatrists, many of whom have a vested interest in the success of the products. Integrity, it seems, is the only thing in short supply for psychiatry these days.

Just like the new antidepressant and antipsychotic drugs that have been introduced in the past three decades, the idea behind these new treatments was simply to make money. In 2006, US sales alone for these new gadgets topped 289 billion, and continue to rise. Between 1998 and 2006, the industry spent 855 million dollars on lobbying—a total which exceeds that of all other lobbies—to keep that momentum rolling.

You can’t fault the desire to make money; it’s the American way. But when treatments are equated to widgets, profits will always trump concerns of efficacy and safety. Can you think of an industry in which that has not been the case? Sadly, this was not always the situation with psychiatry. The early psychiatric drugs were developed by industry and psychopharmacologists working in concert, striving toward the production of effective and reasonably safe agents. And they succeeded. The older and less expensive antidepressants and antipsychotics are still just as good as or better than the new agents. In fact, the cost to patients drops from 18% to 6% of their medical dollar when they switch from patented to generic medications.

The new psychiatric drugs and novel treatments are frauds. The evidence that they work is weak and is often distorted to the point of fabrication. Studies show that the new antidepressants (e.g., Prozac, Paxil, and Citalopram) achieve remissions at only slightly better rates than a placebo. The widely prescribed anticonvulsant valproic acid (Depakote) outpaces lithium in prescriptions as a mood stabilizer, and yet it’s not as effective. That’s because the guidelines for psychiatric drug treatments are written by academics paid out of the pocket of Big Pharma. These guidelines are required reading in residency training and dictate the diagnostic and treatment decision-making of most psychiatrists, but really they’re just cookbooks, following the bottom line not the data. The most recent version of the DSM, for example, was drafted by academics, many of whom continue to receive substantial financial support from the industry. This clear conflict of interest in part accounts for why the thresholds for illnesses in the manual continue to get lower and lower: if more people are “ill,” it justifies the prescription of more psychotropic medication. Thus perpetuating the whole corrupt cycle.

Over the past half-dozen years, academic psychiatry has started to wean itself from the pharmaceutical milk-cow. Drug “reps” are restricted at most medical centers now, and direct payments to departmental activities are increasingly limited. These are good first steps, but financial support to departments still occurs. Multisite clinical trials are still industry affairs. The well-known psychiatrists and experts crafting treatment guidelines and new versions of the DSM are still industry supported. Despite the financial pain that might ensue, the only solution is to end the relationship. No academic responsible for the training and mentoring of medical students and young physicians should accept any industry money. They already receive adequate financial support from their institutions. If the industry wants its products tested, unrestricted grants can be given to the institution, which can then monitor the use of the funds for a small overhead fee as is done in the case of other funding sources. No more industry-designed and analyzed research. No more hidden unfavorable data. No more industry-supported lectures. No more direct industry support of any kind. This way, even if we make mistakes, our medicine will at least have integrity.

Michael A. Taylor, MD, is the author of Hippocrates Cried: The Decline of American Psychiatry. He works as an adjunct clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Michigan Medical School. He was founding editor of the peer-reviewed journal, Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology, and also worked as professor, chairman, and director at the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Chicago Medical School. He established and directed the psychiatry residency-training program at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Paul Rabinow interview by Edyta Niemyjska and Michael J. Kelly on February 18th, 2013 @ Figure/Ground Communication

Dr. Rabinow was interviewed by Edyta Niemyjska and Michael J. Kelly on February 18th, 2013 

Read the full Interview here

Dr. Paul Rabinow is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley and one of the world’s leading scholars on the philosophy of Michel Foucault. He is Director of the Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory and former Director of Human Practices for the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center. Dr. Rabinow is the editor and author of numerous books, some of which include Design Human Practices: An Experiment in Synthetic Biology (with Gaymon Bennett), The Accompaniment: Assembling the Contemporary, Marking Time: On the Anthropology of the Contemporary, Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco, A Machine to Make a Future: Biotech Chronicles (with Talia Dan Cohen), Anthropos Today: Reflections on Modern Equipment, The Essential Foucault (with Nikolas Rose), French DNA: Trouble in Purgatory, Essays in the Anthropology of Reason, Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth: The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984, Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment, Interpretive Social Science: A Second Look (with W. Sullivan), The Foucault Reader, Michel Foucault, Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (with Hubert Dreyfus), and Interpretive Social Science: A Reader (with W. Sullivan).

What where the motivating factors for your choosing to go into academia?

I grew up in New York City, and I was a curious young man, interested in various things of the world.  The atmosphere in the 1950s was political because of McCarthyism and I grew up in a kind of Socialist-oriented community. So, I had a kind of childhood that was already fairly alert to larger problems in the world.  Like a lot of bright young kids I was good at math and I went to Stuyvesant High School, which is a public high school with a competitive exam. It was a high school where we were very committed to science and math. So, I had a public high school education but of a terrific sort.  It was all boys which, given how immature we all were, made life easier.  I had a kind of exposure to and enjoyment of very intense thinking in particular in mathematics but there were also literature courses and what have you.  I was also in an intellectual milieu in which, in that part of NYC (i.e. Queens), there was a summer camp in which, believe it or not, we even had a philosophy counselor that would bore us with Ludwig Wittgenstein at a young age.

The idea that I was moving into sophisticated, intense, political and intellectual activity from a fairly young age in New York was unusual at least up to a certain point.  It may have been unusual in many other places in America but less so there.  Also for whatever reasons, I have never been very clear about this, I was a fan of Paris from a very young age.  Certainly by high school and actually even before I was reading French literature and philosophy, and obviously that interest has stayed with me.

I had a choice between going to Columbia University or the University of Chicago.  I met some friends of my parents that had gone to Chicago and I liked them a lot.  They were very intense, bohemian and very active politically and intellectually, and it struck me that if that was what was coming out of Chicago then that was exciting. So I went to Chicago, although my parents wanted me to stay in NY. Chicago was an incredibly advanced intellectual place that suited me extremely well, and it is where I earned my B.A. and Ph.D.

The University of Chicago is one of the main universities in the U.S. that had a very structured curriculum. They assumed that they knew better than the students what the students should learn, at least for several years, that you were capable of learning anything, and that learning shouldn’t be overly specialized.  We also had a very broad and rigorous exposure to many things in the world and I liked that a lot.  For instance, there was a required non-Western civilization course (this is in the early ‘60s) and so I took the Indian civilization course, which was taught by multiple people: anthropologists, historians, sanskritists, lawyers, and others.  Hence the idea that first of all the world is global and that multiple disciplines had to contribute to an understanding of any important phenomena was there all the way through for me. My main philosophical training was with a man called Richard McKeon. He was the dean of Humanities and a famous Aristotle scholar with a particular approach to the history of philosophy. It was very intimidating and rigorous but I found it to be extremely challenging and exciting, both as a pedagogic style and understanding what the history of philosophy was going to be. On both levels it was something I carried forward with me to the rest of my life.

On the other hand, I didn’t want to spend my life in the library arguing about philosophic ideas with other philosophers! So I majored in anthropology for which at that point and for many years to come the University of Chicago was arguably the most exciting place to be. Anthropology at Chicago had a strong social theory component to it (this is again in the 1960s). I worked closely with a number of people. Bernard Cohn, who worked on India, where I was originally thinking of going, was a wonderful teacher, a very wonderful man. And then Clifford Geertz, my advisor, who was a brilliant fellow but a kind of an awkward human being. In any case, that’s how I got to Morocco.

The idea that there was this inherent complementarity between the history of philosophy, the basic questions of philosophy, and actually going out into the world and engaging experientially in situations seemed to me not in conflict.  Certainly, it is not how the philosophic disciplines have developed, that’s not what they do, which seems to be an impoverishment.

So, that’s one version of the basic formation.  I should add that I took my doctoral exams as an undergraduate in Chicago, for a variety of reasons, so they were obliged to let me into the graduate program which they had not done previously for Chicago undergraduates.  We made a deal that they would take me into the graduate program if I went to Paris for a year. Which was one of those offers you can’t refuse.  This was 1965-66.  I went to Paris and I sat in the seminars of Claude-Levi Strauss, Louis Dumont, and also the lectures of Jean Hyppolite at the Collège de France.  Jean Hyppolite was one of the Foucault’s mentors, I found out later.  The French connections in all of this are continued all the way though my work. 

Who would you consider to be your mentors in graduate school, and were there some lessons you learned from them that you would like to share?

The thing that was powerfully impressive about the University of Chicago was the complementary influence of tradition and new pedagogy from Robert Hutchins; what really mattered was the approach to learning and the curriculum as much as any of the individual professors.  The single biggest influence on me as an undergraduate was Richard McKeon.  He was a very stern, tough teacher but it wasn’t just him.  It was the whole structure of the college.  There was a very strong sense that there were objective questions in the world and that he taught us very rigorously how to read texts in a structured and incisive manner.  As opposed to other educational experiences in America today the game was not how clever your interpretation could be but being in awe and then attempting some degree of mastery, whether it was Aristotle or Spinoza, before you had any opinion about it.

That was the very discipline that suited me, on the one hand.  On the other hand, there was the experiential side of research that I found in anthropology.  My main influence Bernard Cohn, Barney as we called him, was a pretty warm fellow.  He taught history of anthropology.  That was very influential.  I would not say per se that I had a direct mentor, that is, except for the institutions.  Stuyvesant High School and the University of Chicago were ultimately my mentors more than individual people.  I have the same kind of relationship with Foucault.  That is to say, I learned a great deal from him.  I was fascinated, intrigued and challenged, but that wasn’t per se a kind of individual relationship of that sort. Rather, he was someone that combined deep philosophical questions with a very impressive empirical research, and that seemed to be missing from most if not all of the philosophy.  It gave a critical edge to all of the anthropology in which I was interested.

Behind all of this there is John Dewey who was given a lot of lip service in Chicago and his thinking was very influential in much of what was going on.  It was only recently that I really returned to Dewey and I have been seeing a lot of connections but I think that, at some level, American pragmatism is very strong in my work.  Especially in that there is no real separation between conceptual work and experience. (...)