.jpg?width=500 "Kant")
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Born in 1926, Foucault reaches his centenary in the same year that the first volume of The History of Sexuality turns fifty. The symposium meeting in Pennsylvania at the end of September is no mere commemoration: thirteen Collège de France lecture courses and a fourth volume, published after his death, have made rereading him unavoidable.
Auguste Comte died on 5 September 1857; Ludwig Boltzmann took his own life on 5 September 1906. One announced that humanity had entered the age of positive science; the other was worn down defending the reality of atoms against physicists who called them a convenient fiction. The same date holds the promise of positivism and its price.
'Concept' is among the words philosophy uses most and questions least. A new Cambridge collection follows its history from ancient Greece to Chinese and Indian thought, from Islamic philosophy to Kant and on to conceptual engineering. The result is less a history of philosophy than philosophy inspecting its own instrument.
Ivan Illich was born on 4 September 1926; Albert Schweitzer died on 4 September 1965. One asked at what point institutions built for people begin to govern them; the other opened the boundary of the moral community to all living things. Both regarded the idea of progress from a critical distance.
Edward Coke died on 3 September 1634; Oliver Cromwell on 3 September 1658. One wrote that the king stands under the law; the other executed the king and failed to build a lasting order in his place. Two deaths on the same date hold the founding question of modern political philosophy from both ends.
J. G. A. Pocock changed the rules for the history of political thought. He asked not what philosophers thought but which language let them think it. His notion of 'political languages' shows that what a text can say is settled in advance — and it applies to today's arguments too.
Christian Tornau, a Latinist at Würzburg, has identified two previously unknown sermons by Augustine in a monastic manuscript held in Poland. Their subject is the Witch of Endor summoning a dead prophet — which is to say, the question of whether God is omnipotent. The sermons give no answer; they leave the congregation to think.
William Rowan Hamilton died on 2 September 1865; Franz Neumann on 2 September 1954. One sought the ground of algebra in Kant's intuition of 'pure time'; the other argued that Nazi Germany was not, in fact, a state at all. Two deaths on the same date ask the same question from different places: what holds a structure up?
He wrote about madness, illness, crime and sexuality, but he asked a single question: how does a human being make himself a subject, and how does power operate while he does it? Foucault's real legacy is not his books but a habit of suspicion — one an age of digital surveillance needs more than ever.
