Zarathustra's Last Supper:Nietzche's Higher Men in Thus Spoke Zarathustra Book

Extremely dense, and perhaps ineffectively critical of Kuhn's theory in its approach of making the professor out to be a tool of Cold War Harvard's (and the USA's) paranoid ideology, inasmuch as that ideology has since become business as usual in the scientific community even after the era came to a close. If anything, post-Cold War Science is a validation of Kuhn beyond any of the supporting examples he himself derived from the systems developed before the Twentieth Century. Today, Kuhn's "normal science" is Science, and the auxiliary assumptions that Fuller reads between Kuhn's lines are indeed the nature of modern research and development. Whether or not Thomas Kuhn was instigated by the industrialization of scientific thought to purposely further it, the result -- and Kuhn's legacy -- is a success, at least for the duration of this paradigm.

That said, Fuller's admitted approach to the subject as a sociologist and from a historicist perspective are effective in painting a perspective of Kuhn's life and work below the surface, and, regardless of the extent to which it is valid in that respect, is a deep and informative portrayal of how the aims and means of the scientific community evolved leading into the Twentieth Century and throughout it. In laying out the groundwork for a historicist analysis, Fuller compiles a local history of science in the United States during the most influential part of its reign as a global power, and this compilation is useful in its own right.

The Bennington discussion is certainly worthwhile, more in depth than other 'intro' pieces, but what makes this text essential in the Derrida canon is his own shockingly personal discussion of his relationship to his mother and to religion. Inspired Caputo's Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, and has a profound impact on the way I read Derrida in general.