On April 5th, 1841, a young woman stood beneath an elm tree in far western Illinois. This was Louisa Beaman, twenty-six, and at this point in her life an orphan. Her father had died in Kirtland, Ohio, in 1837; her mother, only a few months before...
The five versions of the same volume presented here in French, English, German, Italian, and Spanish, could serve as a pretext for a reflection on the work of translation—not only of words, but also of ideas, contexts, and images.
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This article is a slightly edited excerpt of the lecture given on the occasion of the awarding of the Edgar di Picciotto International Prize of the Graduate Institute of Geneva to Joan Wallach Scott, Professor Emerita in the...
"Life is a term, none more familiar. And one almost would take it for an affront, to be asked what he meant by it," writes John Locke. But he immediately adds: "And yet, if it comes in question, whether a plant, that lies ready formed in the seed...
We can respect the right of free speech without having to respect the ideas being uttered. Critical thinking is precisely not a program of neutrality, not tolerance of all opinion, not an endorsement of the idea that anything goes. It is about...
Didier Fassin, James D. Wolfensohn Professor in the School of Social Science, has authored Ragione umanitaria. Una storia morale del presente (DeriveApprodi, 2018), an analysis of the premises, tensions,...
In Por una repolitización del mundo. Las vidas descartables como desafío del siglo xxi (Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2018), Didier Fassin, James D. Wolfensohn Professor in the School of Social Science,...
Recently, societies have become more repressive, their laws more relentless, their magistrates more inflexible, independently of the evolution of crime. In this book, using genealogical and ethnographic approaches, anthropologist...
Why should we write the history and sociology of the social sciences? Some have suggested that putting science under the sociological microscope is self-indulgent and dangerously relativist. Others murmur that only...
On April 6, 1960, Institute for Advanced Study Director Robert Oppenheimer received a letter from psychologist John E. Drevdahl, requesting his support in setting up a study among IAS Members to assess the factors that...
Didier Fassin, James D. Wolfensohn Professor in the School of Social Science, has authored Life: A Critical User’s Manual (Polity Press, 2018), which asks "How can we think of life in its dual expression—...
As part of Ideas: Celebrating 2017–18, Robbert Dijkgraaf, Institute Director and Leon Levy Professor, ...