Richard Rorty 1931-2007

Richard Rorty has passed away.
(Rorty had a great influence on my thinking during my Ph.D, particularly his book Contingency, Irony and Solidarity and its ideas about non-representational theory (now of course, more trendy). The discussion of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is amazing and completely illuminates the book.)
Update. Stanford’s announcement here.
NYT here.
Update II. Talking Points Memo Cafe [...]

Did Foucault cripple the history of sexuality?

(Updated)
If you’re interested in the history of sexuality and whether or not Foucault said that the concept of being gay arose in the nineteenth century, there’s something of a discussion about it here.

Translating Foucault’s memorial

Where was Foucault’s memorial service? It’s all in the translation.
[t]here is a sense in which it is far more difficult to translate Le Nouvel Observateur than a work by Michel Foucault. “Straightforward” is not a word that can readily be applied to language, which, like a confidence man, is often most devious when it seems [...]

Visualization of the genealogy of influence

Mike Love has developed an interactive visualization of the genealogy of influence among philosophers. You can click on it to reposition the graph, double-click to bring up their entry in wikipedia.
Love further discusses the idea of influence in the context of the famous “anxiety of influence” here. He looks at Foucault’s essay on genealogy as [...]