Pierre Bourdieu was a great help to me (through his writings) in my dissertation. Because I've been sort of out of it, I was glad for the reminders from AKMA.

Miasma

Another Sad Transition. The other day, novelist Alex Golub commented on what great intellectual losses we’ve suffered this year: Pierre Bourdieu, Hans-Georg Gadamer, John Rawls, and yesterday it was announced Ivan Illich died on Monday [AKMA's Random Thoughts]

From the NYTimes Obituary for Ivan Illich:

Mr. Illich was perhaps best known for his 1971 book, "De-Schooling Society," which protested mandatory public education and the institutionalization of learning. Along with works like Paul Goodman's, "Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society," published in 1960, it provided grist for a society's growing ambivalence about educational institutions and much else.

Mr. Illich was a priest who thought there were too many priests, a lifelong educator who argued for the end of schools and an intellectual sniper from a perch with a wide view. He argued that hospitals cause more sickness than health, that people would save time if transportation were limited to bicycles and that historians who rely on previously published material perpetuate falsehoods.

His intellectual ordnance of anarchist panache, hatred of bureaucracy, Jesuitic argumentation, deep reverence for the past and watered-down Marxism, was applied to many targets, including relations between the sexes. More often than not, his conclusions were startling: he thought life was better for women in pre-modern times.

2:25:47 AM