Today's Picks from Wikipedia Michel Foucault was a French philosopher and held a chair at the Collège de France, a chair to which he gave the title "The History of Systems of Thought". His writings have had an enormous impact on other scholarly work: Foucault's influence extends across the humanities and social sciences, and across many applied and professional areas of study. Foucault is well known for his critiques of various social institutions, most notably psychiatry, medicine and the prison system, and also for his ideas on the history of sexuality. His general theories concerning power and the relation between power and knowledge, as well as his ideas concerning "discourse" in relation to the history of Western thought have been widely discussed and applied. Foucault was also opposed to all social constructs that implied an identity, which included everything from the identity of male/female and homosexuality, to that of criminals and political activists. A philosophical example of Foucault's theories on identity was an observation of the history of homosexual identity, which progressed over the years from an implied act to an implied identity. Read the rest of this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault Português _______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries: 1732: The Royal Opera House opened at Covent Garden in London, England. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Opera_House) 1815: Michel Ney, Marshal of France, was executed by a firing squad near the Luxembourg Garden in Paris for supporting Napoleon Bonaparte. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Ney) 1941: World War II: The Imperial Japanese Navy made its attack on Pearl Harbor, Oahu, Hawaii. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/attack_on_Pearl_Harbor) Português 1965: East-West Schism: Patriarch Athenagoras I of Constantinople and Pope Paul VI issued the Catholic-Orthodox joint declaration and simultaneously lifted mutual excommunications that had been in place since 1054. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East-West_Schism) Português 1995: The Galileo spacecraft arrived at Jupiter, a little more than six years after it was launched by Space Shuttle Atlantis during Mission STS-34. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_spacecraft) Português _____________________ Wikiquote of the day: "That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great." -- Willa Cather (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Willa_Cather) Português