Robert D'Amico

Bio: Robert D'Amico is an academic researcher from University of Florida. The author has contributed to research in topics: Telos & Western philosophy. The author has an hindex of 8, co-authored 32 publications receiving 15259 citations.

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

Abstract: This writer who has warned us of the “ideological” function of both the oeuvre and the author as unquestioned forms of discursive organization has gone quite far in constituting for both these “fictitious unities” the name (with all the problems of such a designation) Michel Foucault. One text under review, La Volonté de Savoir, is the methodological introduction of a projected five-volume history of sexuality. It will apparently circle back over that material which seems to have a special fascination for Foucault: the gradual emergence of medicine as an institution, the birth of political economy, demography and linguistics as “human sciences,” the invention of incarceration and confinement for the control of the “other” in society (the mad, the libertine, the criminal) and that special violence that lurks beneath the power to control discourse.

The Prison House of Language

Abstract: Lukács attacked modernism in twentieth century literature as “pure formalism,” and echoed with the choice of that term a long ideological and political struggle—which was in many ways only incidentally over literature. In an article by Brecht, only recently published, the model of the nineteenth century narriative novel offered by Lukács is opposed with a paradoxical reply. “Realism is not a mere question of form. Were we to copy the style of these realists, we would no longer be realists… The criteria for popular art and realism must therefore be chosen generously and carefully, and not drawn merely from existing realistic works… By doing so, one would arrive at formalistic criteria, and popular art and realism in form only.”

Epistemologie des Sciences de l'Homme

Abstract: This publication brings together three sections of Piaget's enormous study published by UNESCO, Tendances Principales de la Recherche dans les Sciences Sociales et Humaines. In this two volume work Piaget attempts to develop, in rejecting the hierarchical treatment of the sciences, the specificity of each level of research and its reciprocity with other levels without a reduction of all levels to one (psychology to bio-chemistry, for example). Piaget has described his view as one where “rather than envisaging human knowledge as a pyramid or building of some sort, we should think of it as a spiral the radius of whose turns increases as the spiral rises.”

Historicism and Knowledge

Abstract: D'Amico re-examines the reasons for the increasing influence of historicist arguments in modern philosophy. This book should be of interest to students and teachers of philosophy, critical theory, intellectual history.

Is Disease a Natural Kind

Abstract: In The Nature of Disease, Lawrie Reznek argues that disease is not a natural kind term. I raise objections to Reznek's two central arguments for establishing that disease is not a natural kind. In criticizing his a priori, conceptual argument against naturalism, I argue that his conclusion rests on a weaker argument that appeals to the empirical diversity in the symptoms and manifestations of disease. I also raise questions about the account of natural kinds which Reznek utilizes and his point that conventions for classification are excluded by there being natural kinds.

Bodies that matter : on the discursive limits of sex

Abstract: Preface Acknowledgements Part 1: 1. Bodies that Matter 2. The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary 3. Phantasmatic Identification and the Assumption of Sex 4. Gender is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion Part 2: 5. 'Dangerous Crossing': Willa Cather's Masculine Names 6. Queering, Passing: Nella Larsen Rewrites Psychoanalysis 7. Arguing with the Real 8. Critically Queer. Notes. Index

Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences

Abstract: What do a seventeenth-century mortality table (whose causes of death include "fainted in a bath," "frighted," and "itch"); the identification of South Africans during apartheid as European, Asian, colored, or black; and the separation of machine- from hand-washables have in common? All are examples of classification -- the scaffolding of information infrastructures. In Sorting Things Out, Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star explore the role of categories and standards in shaping the modern world. In a clear and lively style, they investigate a variety of classification systems, including the International Classification of Diseases, the Nursing Interventions Classification, race classification under apartheid in South Africa, and the classification of viruses and of tuberculosis. The authors emphasize the role of invisibility in the process by which classification orders human interaction. They examine how categories are made and kept invisible, and how people can change this invisibility when necessary. They also explore systems of classification as part of the built information environment. Much as an urban historian would review highway permits and zoning decisions to tell a city's story, the authors review archives of classification design to understand how decisions have been made. Sorting Things Out has a moral agenda, for each standard and category valorizes some point of view and silences another. Standards and classifications produce advantage or suffering. Jobs are made and lost; some regions benefit at the expense of others. How these choices are made and how we think about that process are at the moral and political core of this work. The book is an important empirical source for understanding the building of information infrastructures.

Participatory action research

Abstract: This glossary aims to clarify some of the key concepts associated with participatory action research.

The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection

Abstract: Introduction 1. Stubborn attachment, bodily subjection 2. Circuits and bad conscience 3. Subjection, resistance, resignification 4. 'Conscience doth make subjects of us all' 5. Melancholy gender/refused identification keeping it moving 6. Psychic inceptions Notes Index.

Manifesto for a relational sociology

Abstract: Sociologists today are faced with a fundamental dilemma: whether to conceive of the social world as consisting primarily in substances or processes, in static "things" or in dynamic, unfolding rela...