New paper: Brian Leiter

As John points out in comments, there’s a new paper by Brian Leiter of the University of Chicago law School  posted to SSRN entitled “The Epistemic Status of the Human Sciences: Critical Reflections on Foucault.”

Abstract:
Any reader of Foucault’s corpus recognizes fairly quickly that it is animated by an ethical impulse, namely, to liberate individuals from a kind of oppression from which they suffer. This oppression, however, does not involve the familiar tyranny of the Leviathan or the totalitarian state; it exploits instead values that the victim of oppression herself accepts, and which then leads the oppressed agent to be complicit in her subjugation. It also depends, crucially, on a skeptical thesis about the epistemology of the social sciences. It is this conjunction of claims-that individuals oppress themselves in virtue of certain moral and epistemic norms they accept-that marks Foucault’s uniquely disturbing contribution to the literature whose diagnostic aim is, with Max Weber, to understand the oppressive character of modernity, and whose moral aim is, with the Frankfurt School, human liberation and human flourishing. I offer here both a reconstruction of Foucault’s project – focusing on the role that ethical and epistemic norms play in how agents subjugate themselves – and some modestly critical reflections on his project, especially the weaknesses in his critique of the epistemic standing of the human sciences.

There’s already a lengthy rebuttal at the Chasm blog.

Society of Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy meeting

The Society of Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy just had its meeting (.pdf) in Pittsburgh. Among the interesting-looking sessions were the following. Would be nice if these could be posted up somewhere.

Foucault Beyond Foucault: Power and Its Intensifications since 1984
Marquis A (Stanford University Press)
Moderator: Edward McGushin, Saint Anselm College
Speaker: Todd May, Clemson University
Speaker: Johanna Oksala, University of Dundee
Respondent: Jeffrey T. Nealon, Penn State University

Foucault, Skepticism, and Problematization
Salon 3 Moderator: Erinn Gilson, Wittenberg University
“Deleuze as a Source of Foucault’s Concept of Problematization,”
Colin Koopman, University of California, Santa Cruz
“On Michel Foucault, Skepticism, and the Grand Rise of Social Engineering,”
Matthew C. Eshleman, The University of North Carolina, Wilmington

Foucault: Race and Sexuality
Marquis B Moderator: Gerard Kuperus, University of San Francisco
“Biopolitics in the Jim Crow South: Lynching, Racial Hygiene, and the Fear of
Miscegenation,” Wade Roberts, Oklahoma City University
“African American Sexuality and the Repressive Hypothesis: Reading Patricia
Hill Collins with Michel Foucault,” Camisha Russell, Penn State University

Feminism, Power, Ethics:
Marquis B Foucauldian Trajectories at the Collège de France
Moderator: Jeffrey Bell, Southeast Louisiana State University
“Foucault, Feminism, and Familial Power,” Chloë Taylor, McGill University
“A New Architecture of Power, an Anticipation of Ethics,” Richard A. Lynch,
DePauw University
“Modernity/Femininity: the Self-sacrificing Subject,” Dianna Taylor, John
Carroll University

There were also many other sessions on Gadamer, Heidegger, Arendt, Husserl etc.