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The Emergence of Sexuality : Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts
The Emergence of Sexuality Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts Author:Arnold I. Davidson In a book that moves between philosophy and history, and with lasting significance for both, Arnold Davidson elaborates a powerful new method for considering the history of concepts and the nature of scientific knowledge, a method he calls "historical epistemology." He applies this method to the history of sexuality, with important consequences ... more »for our understanding of desire, abnormality, and sexuality itself. "An extraordinary collection of papers that will constitute a book of lasting value for the history of science, the history of medicine and psychiatry, critical theory, and philosophy. Arnold Davidson has accomplished what many have tried and practically none successfully accomplished: he has found a way to write of and through both the analytic tradition in philosophy and the continental concern with épistémologie. People may well turn to this book as a source about the emergence of sexuality, the nature of historical argumentation, the nature of 'monstrosity,' 'perversion,' or the interpretation of Foucault. But in my view it is really about the nature of concepts: as such, it offers one of the most sustained, interesting and novel attempts to join the analytic and historical dimensions of the 'concept' problem that we have in the last fifty years." —Peter Galison, Mallinckrodt Professor of the History of Science and Physics, Harvard University« less