The Banana Peel Project

Looking over Foucault’s ingenious structural history of medical practice, The Birth of the Clinic (1963; English translation 1973) I was struck by how well Foucault’s early work draws together communication, critical theory, and the anthropology of medicine.  The study of communication–language, symbols, discourses–is at the heart of any serious attempt to understand–to set apart, to […]

On the surface, science is all specialized vocabularies and inscrutable instrumentation. But a peak just beneath the surface tension reveals that it rests on an ocean of faith in symbols.
At one level, science is the whole mess of institutionalized structures–labs, journals, funding lines, paperwork, test tubes, universities, and scientists–that collectively structure practical knowledge about […]

So, what is a thought style or mode of thought? According to Ludwik Fleck, it can only be understood in relation to the broader concept of a “thought collective.”
If we define “thought collective” as a community of persons mutually exchanging ideas or maintaining intellectual interaction, we will find by implication that it also provides the […]