•  5388
    Rorty’s Linguistic Turn: Why (More Than) Language Matters to Philosophy
    Contemporary Pragmatism 8 (1): 61-84. 2011.
    The linguistic turn is a central aspect of Richard Rorty’s philosophy, informing his early critiques of foundationalism in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and subsequent critiques of authoritarianism in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. It is argued that we should interpret the linguistic turn as a methodological suggestion for how philosophy can take a non-foundational perspective on normativity. It is then argued that although Rorty did not succeed in explicating normativity without foun…Read more
  •  2206
    Putting Foucault to Work: Analytic and Concept in Foucaultian Inquiry
    with Tomas Matza
    Critical Inquiry 39 (4): 817-840. 2013.
    The forceful impact of Michel Foucault’s work in the humanities and social sciences is apparent from the sheer abundance of its uses, appropriations, and refigurations. This article calls for greater self-conscious reflexivity about the relationship between our uses of Foucault and the opportunities afforded by his work. We argue for a clearer distinction between analytics and concepts in Foucault-inspired work. In so doing we draw on key moments of methodological self-reflection in Foucault’s C…Read more
  •  1826
    A growing body of interpretive literature concerning the work of Michel Foucault asserts that Foucault’s critical project is best interpreted in light of various strands of philosophical phenomenology. In this article I dispute this interpretation on both textual and philosophical grounds. It is shown that a core theme of ‘the phenomenological Foucault’ having to do with transcendental inquiry cannot be sustained by a careful reading of Foucault’s texts nor by a careful interpretation of Foucaul…Read more
  •  1598
    Infopolitics, Biopolitics, Anatomopolitics
    Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 39 (1): 103-128. 2018.
    This paper argues for a distinctive concept of "infopolitics" as a theoretical tool for understanding how new regimes of data are exerting increasing political control of our lives. It seems almost undeniable today that there is a politics at stake in such ubiquitous features of our society as social media interaction, electioneering (and election hacking) through those interactions, cell phone addiction, personal information monetization, the lack of security in personal data markets, and massi…Read more
  •  147
    Foucault's historiographical expansion: Adding genealogy to archaeology
    Journal of the Philosophy of History 2 (3): 338-362. 2008.
    This paper offers a rereading of Foucault's much-disputed mid-career historiographical shift to genealogy from his earlier archaeological analytic. Disputing the usual view that this shift involves an abandonment of an archaeological method that was then replaced by a genealogical method, I show that this shift is better conceived as a historiographical expansion. Foucault's work subsequent to this shift should be understood as invoking both genealogy and archaeology. The metaphor of expansion i…Read more
  •  143
    Scholarship on the politics of new media widely assumes that communication functions as a sufficient conceptual paradigm for critically assessing new media politics. This article argues that communication-centric analyses fail to engage the politics of information itself, limiting information only to its consequences for communication, and neglecting information as it reaches into our selves, lives, and actions beyond the confines of communication. Furthering recent new media historiography on t…Read more
  •  141
    Language is a form of experience: Reconciling classical pragmatism and neopragmatism
    Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 43 (4). 2007.
    : The revival of philosophical pragmatism has generated a wealth of intramural debates between neopragmatists like Richard Rorty and contemporary scholars devoted to explicating the classical pragmatism of John Dewey and William James. Of all these internecine conflicts, the most divisive concerns the status of language and experience in pragmatist philosophy. Contemporary scholars of classical pragmatism defend experience as the heart of pragmatism while neopragmatists drop the concept of exper…Read more
  •  135
    Coding the Self: The Infopolitics and Biopolitics of Genetic Sciences
    Hastings Center Report 50 (S1): 6-14. 2020.
    This article compares three models for conceptualizing the political and ethical challenges of contemporary genetics, genomics, and postgenomics. The three analytical approaches are referred to as the state-politics model, the biopolitical model, and the infopolitical model. Each of these models is valuable for different purposes. But comparing these models in terms of their influence in contemporary discussions, the first is by far the dominant approach, the second is gaining in importance, and…Read more
  •  130
    Genealogical Pragmatism: How History Matters for Foucault and Dewey
    Journal of the Philosophy of History 5 (3): 533-561. 2011.
    This article offers the outlines of a historically-informed conception of critical inquiry herein named genealogical pragmatism. This conception of critical inquiry combines the genealogical emphasis on problematization featured in Michel Foucault's work with the pragmatist emphasis on reconstruction featured in John Dewey's work. The two forms of critical inquiry featured by these thinkers are not opposed, as is too commonly supposed. Genealogical problematization and pragmatist reconstruction …Read more
  •  124
    Data increasingly drive our lives. Often presented as a new trajectory, the deep immersion of our lives in data has a history that is well over a century old. By revisiting the work of early pioneers of what would today be called data science, we can bring into view both assumptions that fund our data-driven moment as well as alternative relations to data. I here excavate insights by contrasting a seemingly unlikely pair of early data technologists, Francis Galton and W.E.B. Du Bois. Galton, wel…Read more
  •  123
    Revising Foucault: The history and critique of modernity
    Philosophy and Social Criticism 36 (5): 545-565. 2010.
    I offer a major reassessment of Foucault’s philosophico-historical account of the basic problems of modernity. I revise our understanding of Foucault by countering the influential misinterpretations proffered by his European interlocutors such as Habermas and Derrida. Central to Foucault’s account of modernity was his work on two crucial concept pairs: freedom/power and reason/madness. I argue against the view of Habermas and Derrida that Foucault understood modern power and reason as straightfo…Read more
  •  119
    We are now acutely aware, as if all of the sudden, that data matters enormously to how we live. How did information come to be so integral to what we can do? How did we become people who effortlessly present our lives in social media profiles and who are meticulously recorded in state surveillance dossiers and online marketing databases? What is the story behind data coming to matter so much to who we are? In How We Became Our Data, Colin Koopman excavates early moments of our rapidly accelerati…Read more
  •  119
    Despite widespread recognition of an emergent politics of data in our midst, we strikingly lack a political theory of data. We readily acknowledge the presence of data across our political lives, but we often do not know how to conceptualize the politics of all those data points—the forms of power they constitute and the kinds of political subjects they implicate. Recent work in numerous academic disciplines is evidence of the first steps toward a political theory of data. This article maps some…Read more
  •  118
    When data drive health: an archaeology of medical records technology
    with Paul D. G. Showler, Patrick Jones, Mary McLevey, and Valerie Simon
    Biosocieties 17 (4): 782-804. 2022.
    Medicine is often thought of as a science of the body, but it is also a science of data. In some contexts, it can even be asserted that data drive health. This article focuses on a key piece of data technology central to contemporary practices of medicine: the medical record. By situating the medical record in the perspective of its history, we inquire into how the kinds of data that are kept at sites of clinical encounter often depend on informational requirements that originate well outside of…Read more
  •  97
    Viewing Foucault in the light of work by Continental and American philosophers, most notably Nietzsche, Habermas, Deleuze, Richard Rorty, Bernard Williams, and Ian Hacking, Genealogy as Critique shows that philosophical genealogy involves not only the critique of modernity but also its transformation. Colin Koopman engages genealogy as a philosophical tradition and a method for understanding the complex histories of our present social and cultural conditions. He explains how our understanding of…Read more
  •  97
    What ought a political philosophy seek to achieve? How should political philosophy address itself to its subject matter? What is the relation between political philosophy and other forms of reflective inquiry? In answering these metaphilosophical questions, political philosophy has long been dominated by a roughly utopian self-image. According to this conception, the aim of political philosophy is the rigorous development of theoretical ideals of justice, state, and law. I show that leading poli…Read more
  •  88
    Pragmatist Resources for Experimental Philosophy: Inquiry in Place of Intuition
    Journal of Speculative Philosophy 26 (1): 1-24. 2012.
    Recent attention given to the upstart movement of experimental philosophy is much deserved. But now that experimental philosophy is beginning to enter a stage of maturity, it is time to consider its relation to other philosophical traditions that have issued similar assaults against ingrained and potentially misguided philosophical habits. Experimental philosophy is widely known for rejecting a philosophical reliance on intuitions as evidence in philosophical argument. In this it shares much wit…Read more
  •  85
    This deep presence of Foucault’s influence across contemporary theoretical landscapes signals a need for self-reflectiveness that has largely (though not entirely) been missing in contemporary uses of Foucault. While scholarship in a Foucauldian vein is obviously alive and well, scholarship on Foucauldian methodology is not. This paper develops a distinction between two methodological features of Foucault’s work that deserve to be disentangled: I parse the methods (e.g., genealogy, archaeology) …Read more
  •  81
    Bernard Williams on Philosophy’s Need for History
    Review of Metaphysics 64 (1): 3-30. 2010.
    A rather enthusiastic account, according to which analytical philosophy was thoroughly ahistorical and Williams changed that.
  •  74
    I argue for a new broad-based form of critical inquiry which I refer to as genealogical pragmatism. This conception of critical inquiry combines the genealogical emphasis on problematization featured in Michel Foucault's work with the pragmatist emphasis on reconstruction featured in John Dewey's work. Rather than being understood as two opposed forms of critique and inquiry, as is commonly supposed, I demonstrate that problematization and reconstruction fit together quite well. The work of prob…Read more
  •  68
    Rorty’s Moral Philosophy for Liberal Democratic Culture
    Contemporary Pragmatism 4 (2): 45-64. 2007.
    Richard Rorty's moral writings offer a cogent summary of the moral content of contemporary liberal democratic culture. Rorty insists on a divide between our public and private lives, yet he claims that moral progress is primarily driven by the imagination of great poetry and philosophy . A pressing tension thus emerges between private imagination and public moral justification, which is also very real in contemporary liberal democratic culture itself. I sketch a way out of this problem, which fi…Read more
  •  67
    The work of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze frequently gave rise to a practice of philosophy as a form of critical problematization. Critical problematization both resonates between their thought and is also generative for contemporary philosophy in their wake. To examine critical problematization in each, a shared theme of inquiry provides a useful focal point. Foucault and Deleuze each deployed critical problematization in the context of studies of sexuality, a site of excited contestation …Read more
  •  63
    William James's politics of personal freedom
    Journal of Speculative Philosophy 19 (2): 175-186. 2005.
  •  61
    Morals and markets: Liberal democracy through Dewey and Hayek
    Journal of Speculative Philosophy 23 (3). 2009.
    One of the most vexing problems in contemporary liberal democratic theory and practice is the relation between ethics and economics. This article presents a way of bringing this relation into focus in the terms offered by two incredibly influential but too-often neglected twentieth-century political philosophers: John Dewey and Friedrich Hayek. I describe important points of contact between Dewey and Hayek that enable us to begin the project of reframing contemporary debates between ethical egal…Read more
  •  58
    Inquiry into the history of practices in the manner of Foucault's philosophical genealogy requires that we distinguish between practical action, on the one hand, and mere behavior, on the other. The need for this distinction may help explicate an aspect of Foucault's philosophical genealogy that might otherwise appear misplaced, namely his attention to rationalities and its attendant conceptual material. This article shows how a genealogical attention to practice goes hand in hand with an attent…Read more
  •  58
    Abstract: Pragmatism involves simultaneous commitments to modes of inquiry that are philosophical and historical. This article begins by demonstrating this point as it is evidenced in the historicist pragmatisms of William James and John Dewey. Having shown that pragmatism focuses philosophical attention on concrete historical processes, the article turns to a discussion of the specific historiographical commitments consistent with this focus. This focus here is on a pragmatist version of histor…Read more
  •  55
    Good questions and bad answers in Talisse's a pragmatist philosophy of democracy (review)
    Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 45 (1). 2009.
  •  53
    Pragmatism is America's best-known native philosophy. It espouses a practical set of beliefs and principles that focus on the improvement of our lives. Yet the split between classical and contemporary pragmatists has divided the tradition against itself. Classical pragmatists, such as John Dewey and William James, believed we should heed the lessons of experience. Neopragmatists, including Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, and Jürgen Habermas, argue instead from the perspective of a linguistic turn,…Read more