The paper considers the possibility of detecting points of contact between Michel Foucault’s theory of power and the theory of communicative agency formed by Jurgen Habermas. In the beginning, the development of the philosophical discourse of modernity, which Habermas analyzes in his work bearing the same title, is laid out, with the aim to gain insight into the nature of Habermas’s critique of Foucault. After having reviewed some of the basis of Foucault’s theory, the author points out Habermas’s depiction of (...) the theory of power as the pinnacle of Nietzschean, anti - modernist stream of the philosophical discourse. The critique is based on Habermas’s assumption that Foucault’s analyses of power fails to comprehend the complexity of modernity. Foucault, according to Habermas, over - emphasizes one dimension of the process of modernization - gradual strengthening of the disciplinatory power based on the "control of the spirit". The author, however, wishes to point out the importance the theory of power ascribes to the preservation of insight into the complexity of history. Through the insight into multiple and divergent nature of historical processes that are responsible for the formation of modern society, the individual becomes historically self - conscious and able to step out of the paradigm of self - relating subject. As the theory of communicative agency also tends to transcend the "limits of the subject - philosophy", the author concludes that Foucault’s work is, to the same extent as Habermas’s, imbued with the idea of "modernity as an unrealized undertaking". Towards the end of the paper the author analyzes Foucault’s relation to Enlightenment, in order to show the essentially modern nature of his thought. (shrink)

Foucault contra Habermas is an incisive examination of, and a comprehensive introduction to, the debate between Foucault and Habermas over the meaning of enlightenment and modernity. It reprises the key issues in the argument between critical theory and genealogy and is organised around three complementary themes: defining the context of the debate; examining the theoretical and conceptual tools used; and discussing the implications for politics and criticism. In a detailed reply to Habermas' Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, this volume explains (...) the difference between Habermas' philosophical practice and Foucault's between the analytics of truth and the politics of truth. Many of the most difficult arguments in the exchange are subject to a detailed critical analysis. This examination also includes discussion of the ethics of dialogue; the practice of criticism; the politics of recognition, and the function of civil society and democracy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Experience Without Qualities: Boredom and ModernityFelipe GutterriezExperience Without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity. Elizabeth Goodstein. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. Pp. 461. $50.00, cloth.Winner of the Modern Language Association's 2005 award for Best First Book, Elizabeth Goodstein's Experience Without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity is a work impressive for its erudition and rigorous analysis. Experience Without Qualities is a genealogical study of the modern "modern discourse on boredom," a phrase (...) referring both to a family of experiences and to the uses of language associated with them. (Although somewhat murkily introduced, a further distinction operates in Goodstein's account of the modern discourse on boredom, a distinction between language of boredom, language that is part of the expression of boredom, and language on boredom, language that is part of the reflection on boredom. It's the difference between saying, "I'm bored, there's nothing to do," and saying, "Powerlessness is the cause of boredom.") Goodstein believes the modern discourse on boredom exemplifies the modern rhetoric of reflection, the way of understanding and interpreting human experience that is historically and culturally specific to modernity. Through her genealogy of the modern discourse on boredom she hopes "to further the historical task of coming to terms with the fragmentation of subjective experience in the face of the dissolution of metanarratives that is the legacy of the Enlightenment." Experience without Qualities is a dense and complex text over 450 pages in length, and the account that follows necessarily fails to capture the richness that is a principal strength of the text.As an introduction to her genealogy proper, Goodstein examines two contrasting contemporary accounts of boredom. These accounts serve as paradigmatic examples of idealist and materialist accounts of boredom and, by implication, subjectivity generally. Reinhard Kuhn's idealist account treats all social and historical forms of boredom as either incidental to or a manifestation of "ennui," an ahistorical feature of the human condition, an "encounter with nothingness" that is productive of human creativity. Wolf Lepenies's materialist account treats boredom as epiphenomenal, a symptom of "action-inhibition" and a way of legitimating a feeling of powerlessness. On one level, the two accounts provide competing types of explanations, but on another level both are [End Page 257] examples of the characteristic fallacy of the modern rhetoric of reflection, the abstraction of categories of language and their reification into things. Although Goodstein does not use the term, this fallacy could be called the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness." (This is a phrase that Alfred North Whitehead coined in connection with his critique of scientific materialism. Its use suggests the affinities between his critique and Goodstein's account of the modern rhetoric of reflection.)In the case of Kuhn, the fallacy of misplaced concreteness takes the form of an abstraction drawn from the historically and culturally specific language of boredom that Kuhn and his audience share and its reification as an ahistorical principle that grounds Kuhn's idealist language on boredom. In the case of Lepenies, this fallacy takes the form of an abstraction drawn from the language of boredom and reified as the social practices that ground Lepenies's language on boredom. Neither Kuhn's idealist history nor Lepenies's materialist sociology recognize the historicity of the modern discourse on boredom.Goodstein faults Kuhn and Lepenies for their failure to think through the relationship between the language of boredom and the language on boredom. The conditions that make this failure possible are addressed in Chapter 3, "Boredom and the Modernization of Subjectivity." This chapter describes the spread of Enlightenment skepticism in an environment of rapid political and economic change. Beginning toward the end of the eighteenth century and continuing to the middle of the nineteenth, a discursive paradigm shift occurs. The result is a rhetoric of reflection organized around a radically isolated subjectivity and a "clocktime" view of temporality, time as a series of empty, meaningless moments stretching forward in linear progression. This rhetoric of reflection maintains a tension between idealist and materialist accounts of experience within a materialist framework that medicalizes subjectivity.Goodstein's genealogy of the modern discourse on boredom is strongly reminiscent of Foucault's genealogy of modernity... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 9.2 (2002) 187-188 [Access article in PDF] Listening to Foucault Patrick J. Bracken ERICA LILLELEHT'S INTERESTING PAPER combines philosophy, history, service analysis, and social commentary. The philosophical themes are below the surface, implicit rather than explicit. As such the paper echoes the work of Foucault himself. The subjects of his books and other writings ranged from histories of madness and psychiatry, hospitals and medicine, prisons (...) and punishment, to sexuality and ethics. But these were clearly more than histories. In doing what he initially called archaeology and later genealogy, Foucault was writing about different dimensions of how the Western world has come to understand what it is to be human. In Foucault's hands history becomes philosophy. The essence of his work is an invitation to question the project of Enlightenment. However, his interrogation of the legacy of Enlightenment is far from a rejection of reason as has sometimes been claimed. Rather it represents a realization that there are different forms of reason, none of which can claim a place of privilege over others. Foucault challenged the idea that we have to choose to be for or against Enlightenment (Foucault, 1984).Of central concern for him is the idea that knowledge and power imply each other and cannot be separated. This, of course, is anathema to both Marxist and liberal analysts who hold out the idea that truth and ideology are mutually exclusive. The assumption is that if we get the starting point of our analysis right, the truth ("pure and simple") will emerge. For Foucault there are "regimes of truth," discourses through which certain things can be said and statements can be judged as true or false. Such regimes are social products, bound up with the economic, cultural, and political realities of their times. This is not some sort of mindless relativism nor a nihilistic advocacy that, when it comes to knowledge claims, "anything goes." As human beings in an imperfect world we have to struggle continuously toward a better understanding of ourselves and the make-up of this world. As individuals, we have to continue to debate and argue about ideas, facts, and the nature of knowledge. We have to present evidence, argue our case, and prepare to be contradicted as well as supported. This is not in question. Instead, what is involved here is recognition that there is no neutral asocial, acultural, or apolitical vantage point from we can judge the validity of one position over another. Foucault's work nurtures a healthy skepticism of those who claim to have found such a vantage point.Importantly, he rejected the idea that power is always repressive in its nature: working to silence, obscure, and suppress. Particularly in the modern era power is more characteristically productive. Its operations are bound up with the ever-multiplying discourses we produce about ourselves. While increasing scientific knowledge about the human condition appears to represent progress, listening to Foucault means coming to appreciate that things are a great deal more complex. The title of Lilleleht's paper reflects this. At [End Page 187] a time when there is a great deal of talk about "progress" in the area of mental health, her analysis is opportune. Unless we pay attention to the micropolitics of clinical encounters we are at some risk of simply endorsing new forms of professional power. In one light, the psychiatric rehabilitation approach of William Anthony and colleagues appears obviously progressive. It does not depend on the "medical model" and the use of medication and seems genuinely committed to the idea of empowerment. However, with the sort of sensibility engendered through an encounter with Foucault, other issues come into view. Beneath its focus on skills and training we see a very clear normative framework centered on the idea that the person with psychiatric problems should be guided and trained toward fitting in with "his or her particular environment." At stake here is the assumption that the deficit is in the patient. It is he or she who needs to change. Herein lies the issue of power: who is in control of the way in which... (shrink)

: This study aims to discuss the basic argument that sociology, as a science, emerged as an intellectual response to the lost sense of community during social and cultural changes. This argument carries the assumption that the dominating metaphors and perspectives of classical sociology are informed by conservatism. In sociology, this claim is supported by well-known and ambivalent theoretical structures that are developed to explain the process of social change. This study aims to make a criticism of nostalgic sociology considering (...) the idea that the fundamental assumptions of the ambivalent theoretical structure in sociology are nostalgic. In addition, this study also aims to critically read the historical development of Islamism, one of the modern ideologies, with nostalgia and utopia. The suggestion of the article is that either classical sociology or Islamism –two subject appear differently in terms of their topics- gave similar intellectual reactions about the subject that they are unable to cope with ‘the present’ and produce a ‘golden age’ discourse as a solution to ‘the present’. The argument of the study is that either the effort of idealizing ‘the past’ in classical sociology or the myth of coming back home in Islamism against cultural alienation and sense of loss which are lived in ‘the present’ are actually determined by sovereign modernity paradigm. Summary: Behind the nostalgic paradigm, there is a rebuilt history that is shaped as a transition from feudalism to capitalism. In this history, the decline of feudalism corresponds to the loss of rural community, the loss of personal expressionism and the loss of unregulated society. In classical sociology, the heritage left by the solution of this historical reconstruction of society has become common. The anomaly of the modern world is precisely where the modern society from traditional society has emerged in the pathological state created by the loss of social ties with the passing. This pathological condition was first seen in Swiss mercenaries serving away from home, diagnosing nostalgia as a diagnosis of discomfort. We know that Johannes Hofer, who has a sense of humor, has not written any prescription for this disease, which gives some common signs with his melancholy. Sociology, shaped by three different intellectual movements as intellectual responses to the French and Industrial revolutions that allow the transformation of the European society, has taken its place as its focal point, and in the pioneering names, this change is "a change in everything at a dizzying pace, everything that has happened has evaporated and the glory of the world has deteriorated.” Modernity, which refers to the ideals of enlightenment, is blessed not to progress by nature, fluid, rational, contingent, lacking certainty. In fact, this blessing has brought with it the enemy of tradition to the 'new' with reference to its etymological origin. This sophisticated and complex structure unique to modernity only, has inspired some thinkers to conceive of an idealized past or future that is now determinative. Both of these ideas are moderators. The nostalgia becomes modern because of the longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is coeval with modernity. The article refers to Stauth-Turner's nostalgic paradigm, which provides the meta-phasic and meta-phase dominance of classical sociology detailed in Nietzsche's Dance. This paradigm consists of four main components. The first is that the history that we can summarize as a departure from the golden age when the world was a nest for man is seen as a decline and a loss. History is a history of sorrow and despair, as this decline will continue to exacerbate in the future. The example of such a feeling of grief in society theory is Weber's fate sociology. Because, according to Weber, whatever is waiting for us in the future is the polar night of the icy darkness, not the sunlight of summer. The second component of the nostalgic paradigm is the sense of secularization, together with the loss of integrity and moral certainty. This nostalgic trajectory is a very powerful secularization that emphasizes that such devastating social processes as urbanization, capitalist industrialization and the rationalization of everyday life, such as the diversity and complexity of social structure, the spread of scientific knowledge, urbanization with increasing population ratio, it brings forward its theory. With the announcement of the death of God, the gate of a competing and conflicting world has been opened, from which we have been transformed into a very godlike world. It is possible to observe a similar point of view in classical sociology in Durkheim, which has a theoretical basis for the transformation of social structures through professional distinction in the form of mechanical and organic solidarity. Durkheim analyzes social change in a deliberate way, and pre-change stake favors moral coherence. Moral coherence is now lost when collective consciousness is generally weakened in the post-change phase. The third trajectory we encounter in the nostalgic paradigm is the loss of individual autonomy and the decline of genuine social relations. With the loss of the moral unity, the individual has been caught under the domination of the bureaucratic state, in macro-social processes and institutions. It is inevitable that the individual who lost his autonomy is subject to the denial. The increasing exposure of the individual to social bureaucratic associations has been conceptualized by the iron cage metaphor in Weberian sociology. The enlightenment is the result of the panoptic collection of prison. So there is a nostalgic stance in this compound of the nostalgic paradigm that autonomy-ben lost because of the fall of the bureaucratic world under the domination of the modern state. In the nostalgic paradigm, the ultimate component is the feeling of laxity, spontaneity and loss of naturalness. Here, the individual is subject to not only macro-social processes but also micro-ethics. That is, it is understood that Adorno's "managed society" or Foucault's notion of closure prevents the individual's true emotions and enthusiasm, and that the consumer culture is preoccupied with certain preconceived ways of doing in a world dominated. To sum up, the metaphor of nostalgia that we are living in a world where we have been seized by administrative rules of a central state in a way that has lost the moral certainty and autonomy of the individual. The return to home, which is found in a significant part of the texts and practices put forward in the name of Islamism, has reached a deterministic attitude just as it was in classical sociology. In the nostalgic imagination where those who cannot cope with it are thought of as a safe harbor, there is a certain attitude towards deterministic ideologists that simplify, sanctify, and therefore falsify. Indeed, the imagination of a supra-historical, supra-community model for a time like the Golden Age discourse and for all time is itself history from the very beginning to the end. Therefore, it is a manifestation of a major historical process and the ideological design of sociality. The rhetoric discourse presented as a remedy in the present is possible with an anachronistic point of view which idealizes the past, and therefore the reality is distorted. The authentic one is extremely informal. This kind of discourse of authenticity, which is produced as opposed to the modernity that all that is solid melts into air, eventually has to make iron cages around it. As a result, the nostalgic rhetoric, which aims to be a modern chivalrous remedy that everything changes at a dizzying pace, has been determined by the paradigm of modernity, thanks to its self-reflexive nature which contains the opposite. (shrink)

The History of Reason in the Age of Madness revolves around three axes: the Foucauldian critical-historical method, its relationship with enlightenment critique, and the way this critique is implemented in Foucault's seminal work, History of Madness. Foucault's exploration of the origins of psychiatry applies his own theories of power, truth and reason and draws on Kant's philosophy, shedding new light on the way we perceive the birth and development of psychiatric practice. Following Foucault's adoption of 'limit attitude', which investigates (...) the limits of our thinking as points of disruption and renewal of established frames of reference, this book dispels the widely accepted belief that psychiatry represents the triumph of rationalism by somehow conquering madness and turning it into an object of neutral, scientific perception. It examines the birth of psychiatry in its full complexity: in the late eighteenth century, doctors were not simply rationalists but also alienists, philosophers of finitude who recognized madness as an experience at the limits of reason, introducing a discourse which conditioned the formation of psychiatry as a type of medical activity. Since that event, the same type of recognition, the same anthropological confrontation with madness has persisted beneath the calm development of psychiatric rationality, undermining the supposed linearity, absolute authority and steady progress of psychiatric positivism. Iliopoulos argues that Foucault's critique foregrounds this anthropological problematic as indispensable for psychiatry, encouraging psychiatrists to become aware of the epistemological limitations of their practice, and also to review the ethical and political issues which madness introduces into the apparent neutrality of current psychiatric discourse. (shrink)

The book reconstructs the history of Western ethics. The approach chosen focuses the endless dialectic of moral codes, or different kinds of ethos, moral doctrines that are preached in order to bring about a reform of existing ethos, and ethical theories that have taken shape in the context of controversies about the ethos and moral doctrines as means of justifying or reforming moral doctrines. Such dialectic is what is meant here by the phrase ‘moral traditions’, taken as a name for (...) threads of moral discourse, made in turn of other interwoven threads, including transmission of shared codes, appeals to reform of prevailing custom, rational argument about the justification of some precept on the basis of some shared general teaching or principle, and rational argument about the ultimate basis for principles and justification of authoritative teaching. That is, the approach adopted to the reading of ethical texts depends on a firm belief in the fact that philosophers hardly created any ethical doctrine out of nothing. The main point this book tries to highlight is how different philosophical theories emerged and followed each other as a result of attempts at accounting for what was going on in the world of moral traditions. Changes were propelled by controversies between different schools, and highly abstract arguments were the unintended effects of moves made by controversialists forced to transform (and occasionally to turn upside down) their own doctrines in order to face the challenge posed by other arguments. This is the reason why the book examines not only texts that already enjoy pride of place in the history of philosophy (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel), but also other texts usually treated in the histories of religions (the Bible, the Talmud, the Quran), and others considered to be much less philosophical (Plutarchus, Pufendorf). -/- 1. Plato and a response to ethical scepticism. Two different traditions of morality in VI-V century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates answer to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 2. Aristotle and the invention of practical philosophy. Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistence in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The chapter illustrates then the relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater familias, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexis, or ‘disposition’. Prudence, or better practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with bouleusis or deliberation is examined, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 3. Diogenes and philosophy as a way of life. The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. -/- 4. Epicurus and ethics as self-care. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of a science of well-being aiming, more than at pleasure as in the popular view, at reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Epictetus and ethics as therapy of the passions. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. Cicero is treated, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is chosen as the best example of what the Stoic tradition could yield, an art of living based on sophisticated introspection, in turn aimed at making a kind of cognitive therapy possible, dismantling obnoxious passions at their root by systematically correcting false representations. -/- 6. Philo and the reconciliation of Torah and Platonism. A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torā (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Leviticus is stressed as the turning point when emphasis mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, is combined with the legal tradition, yielding the change in sensibility of the Second Temple time. Philo of Alexandria is described as one of the three leading figures – together with Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Yeshua – at the apex the emergence of the mentioned new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, two eventually identical precepts whose meaning is arguably more sober and sensible than the long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine has made us believe and no novelty vis-à-vis so-called Ancient-Testament teachings. -/- 7. Augustine and Christianity as Neo-Platonism. The first section examines the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirqé Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deòt, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexeis and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was ‘the tool by which the world was built’; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous , but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure Judaism. The third section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manichaeism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. The last section summarizes the turbulent history of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and a few topics from the Stoic-Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua had been influenced by cynic preachers, is a proof of the necessity felt by Christian preachers to translate the original ‘Christian’ teaching into a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where an early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 8. Al Farabi and the reconciliation of Islam and Platonism. The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. Al-Farabi wrote an enjoyable remake of the Platonic Republic, arguing that the citizen’s virtues were the basis on which the political building needs to rest. The secular lawgiver is enlightened by the light of reason in his everyday practice of governance, but room is made for the Prophet as the voice of revealed truth that confirms and completes the rational truth that philosophy may afford. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 9. Moshe ben Maimon and the reconciliation of Torah and Aristotelian ethics. The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place a first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed just less striking traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Torah and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirké Avot could be translated. -/- 10. Thomas Aquinas and the reconciliation of Christian morality and Aristotelian ethics. In the first section the fresh start is described of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium. In a first phase, Anselm and Peter Abelard built on a Platonic and Augustinian legacy. In this phase. remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. Aquinas’s ethics is a theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract a self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave "pure nature" incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones, such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too demanding and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Ia-IIae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas could reduce the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethic, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is not ethical ‘absolutism’, as both traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularist enemies of dogmatic morality tend to believe. It is instead an ethic of prudential judgment. Exceptions to this approach – or better results of logical fallacies – are such claims as the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of "intrinsically evil acts", claims that simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences Thomas did not live long enough to draw or was not consistent enough to dare to draw. -/- 11. Francisco de Vitoria and casuistry. The first topic illustrated is the discussion about the notion of pura natura, namely the human condition after the original sin and before divine revelation. The core notion was already there in Aquinas but was later developed by Caietanus (Thomas de Vio) with a number of interesting implications: firstly a view of human nature as such much more positive than Augustine’s and his followers’ view, including both Calvinists and Jansenists; secondly, the implication that the philosopher’s morality, as opposed to the Christian’s morality, is a quite respectable kind of morality; thirdly, that theocracy and prosecution of the unfaithful lacked justification, with more far-fetching consequences than Aquinas himself had dared to draw. The second topic is casuistry, a new name for a comparatively older way of thinking, which was already there in late Stoicism and Cicero as well as in the Talmudic literature. This is an approach aimed at yielding probable enough solutions for doubtful cases even in absence of completely safe staring points. The genre developed from medieval reference books for confessors and became by the sixteenth-century a sophisticated tool-box for dealing with various fields of applied ethics. Francisco Vitoria, the main authority of Baroque Scholasticism, was a controversial figure, among the proponents of the new discipline of casuistry and a consistent proponent of more separation between the religious and the civil authority, stricter limits to the legitimacy of war, innate rights of non-Christian nations in the New World based on the notion of pura natura, providing a standard of ‘natural’ goodness, previous to revelation, on which the Indian nations were judged to live in a naturally good condition, provided with the institutions of family, justice, and religion had accordingly a right to full respect by Christian sovereigns. Bartolomé de Las Casas, arguing along similar lines, was the leader of a historical battle in defence of the rights of the Indios. -/- 12. Michel de Montaigne and the art of living. A short description of one of the Renaissance Phyrronism, one of the classical philosophies revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Montaigne combines the sceptical epistemology with an understanding of ethics – indeed of philosophy as a whole – in terms of an art of living inspired by two basic ideas, sagesse, that is, practical wisdom as the only kind of rationality available after theology, science, and tradition have declared bankrupt, and an aesthetic ideal of self-transformation through the art of writing and introspection. -/- 13. Pierre Nicole and neo-Augustinianism. The chapter illustrates first the vicissitudes of Augustinianism newly born after the late medieval triumph of Thomist Aristotelianism in the alternative Protestant and Catholic versions processed by the Calvinists and the Jansenists. Then it illustrates the doctrines of Pierre Nicole, Blaise Pascal’s best disciple, on the impossibility of introspection, on the ubiquity of self-deception, on the incurably evil character of the passion of love, and on the two moralities, the one of the man of the world, the morality of honesty which is indispensable for granting peace and order but devoid of any true value for eternal salvation, since the same external behaviour may be prompted by opposite motivations, and the morality of charity, the only true one but also useless to society. The third topic is Pierre Malebranche’s view of self-deception as a ubiquitous phenomenon accounting for human action and responsibility and his reformulated theory of self-love, no less ubiquitous than for Nicole and yet not as incurably evil, given the distinction between morally indifferent and even necessary amour de soi and vicious amour proper, a distinction on which the whole of Rousseau’s moral and political theory rests. -/- 14. Samuel von Pufendorf and the new science of morality. The chapter is dedicated to the discovery of the idea of a ‘new moral science’. Hugo Grotius is discussed first highlighting the real character of his project, much closer to the Thomist idea of a natural law accessible to non-corrupted human reason when human beings are living in a state of pura natura. Then Hobbes’s combination of scepticism, voluntarism, and conventionalism is described and both the continuity with Grotius’s new science, in the search for non-revealed rational morality, and the break with him, in the adoption of voluntarism and refusal of an intellectualist view of natural law, are illustrated. Pufendorf’s work is illustrated as a synthesis of the two previous attempts and the – up to Schneewind underestimated – paradigmatic example of the new science of morality. -/- 15. Richard Cumberland and consequentialist voluntarism. The chapter gives an overview of eighteenth-century Anglican ethics, noticing how the Cambridge tradition gave special weight to natural theology as opposed to positive or revealed theology – and how two Cambridge fellows, John Gay and Thomas Brown, elaborated on Cumberland’s (and Malebranche’s, as well as Leibniz’s) strategy for finding a third way between intellectualist view and voluntarist view of the laws of nature. The result of their elaboration was a kind of a rational-choice account of the origins of natural laws, where a law-giver God chooses among a number possible sets of laws on a maximizing criterion, and God’s maximandum is happiness for his creatures. The chapter notices also how such a solution aimed at solving at once the problem of evil and that of the foundation of moral obligation by proving how God’s choice was justified as far as it was the one minimising the amount of suffering in the world. 16. Richard Price and intuitionism. The chapter describes first the doctrines of the Cambridge Platonists, an example of hyper-rationalist reaction to Calvinism. Secondly it describes the sophisticated and universally ignored – from Sidgwick to Anscombe –version of what was later labelled ‘ethical intuitionism’ – showing how it escapes familiar objections and misrepresentations of intuitionism – from Mill to Rawls – in grounding its argument on transcendental arguments while carefully avoiding recourse to introspection and psychological evidence, which has been taken as a too easy target by critics of intuitionism. Thirdly, the chapter discusses Whewell’s ‘philosophy of morality’, as opposed to ‘systematic morality’, not unlike Kant’s distinction between a pure and an empirical moral philosophy. Whewell worked out a systematization of traditional normative ethics as a first step before its rational justification; he believed that the point in the philosophy of morality is justifying a few rational truths about the structure of morality such as to rule hedonism, eudemonism, and consequentialism; yet a system of positive morality cannot be derived solely from such rational truths but requires consideration of the ongoing dialectics between idea and fact in historically given moralities. Whewell’s intuitionism turns out closer to Kantian ethics than commentators have made us believe until now, and quite different from what Sidgwick meant by intuitionism. -/- 17. Adam Smith and the morality of role-switch. The chapter describes first, Hutcheson’s attempt at basing the ‘new science’ of natural law on different bedrock than Pufendorf and the English Platonists, namely a moral sense, a faculty whose existence is assumed to be proved on an empirical basis. The second step is a reconstruction of Hume’s rejoinder in terms of a new science of man including morality on an ‘experimental’ basis, that is, a ‘Newtonian’ hypothetical-deductive approach, distinguished from Hutcheson’s allegedly uncritical descriptive approach to human nature. The third step is a reconstruction of Adam Smith theory of morality understood as emerging from a spontaneous interplay of exchanges of situations (the most basic meaning of the word ‘sympathy’ as construed by this author). -/- 18. Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism. The bulk of the chapter is dedicated to the doctrines of Jeremy Bentham. The Enlightenment spirit that suggested the idea of a new morality, free from religion, is illustrated. The notion of utility is illustrated as well as the subsequent formulations of the principle of utility. The idea of felicific calculus is discussed, showing how its inner difficulties prompted several reformulations of the principle of utility in order to avoid undesirable implications of proposed formulations. The role of the thesis of spontaneous convergence between interest and duty is discussed, showing how it left numberless questions open, and the distinction between the virtues of prudence, justice and beneficence is described as a way out of the deadlocks of classical utilitarianism. After Bentham, Mill’s reformed utilitarianism is reconstructed, showing how it is a kind of mixed system – as closer to common sense as it gives up Bentham’s claims to consistency and simplicity – resulting as unintended consequences from the controversies in which Mill was too keen to engage. The hidden agenda of the controversy between Utilitarianism and Intuitionism, going beyond the image of the battle between Prejudice and Reason, is described, showing how both competing philosophical outlooks turn out to be more research programs than self-contained doctrinal bodies, and such programs appear to be implemented, and indeed radically transformed while in progress thanks to their enemies no less than to their supporters. -/- 19. Immanuel Kant, practical reason and judgment. The chapter argues that Kant took from Moses Mendelssohn the idea of a distinction between geometry of morals and a practical ethic. He was drastically misunderstood by his followers precisely on this point. He had learned from the sceptics and the Jansenists the lesson that men are prompted to act by deceptive ends, and he was aware that human actions are also empirical phenomena, where laws like the laws of Nature may be detected. His practical ethics made room for judgment as a holistic procedure for assessing the saliency of relevant moral qualities in one given situation; this procedure yields the same results as the geometry of morals does for abstract cases but does so immediately and without balancing conflicting duties with each other, since what makes for the salient quality of a situation is perceived from the very beginning. Kant's practical philosophy is richer than the received image, making room for an ‘empirical moral philosophy’ or moral anthropology including treatment of commerce, needs, value and price, happiness and well-being; the overall social theory and philosophy of history is less different from Adam Smith's than the received image makes believe; the paradox of happiness is central to Kant's philosophy; a distinction between happiness and well-being is clearly drawn; the distinction plays a basic role in establishing a link between the economic and the moral life. -/- 20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the critique of abstract universalism. The chapter describes first the Romantic movement and the implications some of its concerns, rescuing passions, community, tradition, the individual as the bearer of a unique destiny, and the longing for organic unity between the individual, mankind and nature. Hegel’s contribution is discussed then, highlighting how, on the one hand, he shared a number of these concerns and on the other he had more rationalist leanings. The notion of morality is the pivotal point of the reconstruction, highlighting how Hegel construes this notion as a key to his own diagnosis of the malaise of modernity – the separation of individual and Gemeinschaft – and how his attack on Kant turns around this very idea. -/- 21. Friedrich Nietzsche against Christianity and the Enlightenment. The chapter illustrates first the idea of deconstruction of the back-world of values. Nietzsche claims to be legitimate heir of the French moralists, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, in so far as he allegedly carries out to its deepest implications their discovery of what lies behind traditional naïve belief in the existence of an objective realm of values just waiting for description by the philosopher. The two exemplars form which genealogy draws inspiration are the classical philologist’s historical reconstructions of lost meanings and the chemist’s decomposition of elements. Then the genealogy of the notions of good and evil carried out in the first dissertation of Genealogy of morals is illustrated with its paradoxical conclusion that will to power is in fact the only ‘genuine’ kind of goodness. The third point illustrated is the dialectic of ascetism and self-realization with its ambiguous outcome. The suggested interpretation of such outcome is that Nietzsche’s normative ethics is a kind of virtue ethics taking an aesthetic ideal as a normative standard -/- 22. George Edward Moore and ideal utilitarianism. The chapter discusses the ideas of common sense and common-sense morality in Sidgwick. I argue that, far from aiming at overcoming common-sense morality, Sidgwick aimed purposely at grounding a consist code of morality by methods allegedly taken from the natural sciences to reach, also in ethics, the same kind of “mature” knowledge as in the natural sciences. His whole polemics with intuitionism was vitiated by the a priori assumption that the widespread ethos of the educated part of humankind, not the theories of the intuitionist philosophers, was what was worth considering as the expression of intuitionist ethics. In spite of a naïve positivist starting-point, Sidgwick was encouraged by his own approach in exploring the fruitfulness of coherentist methods for normative ethics. Thus, Sidgwick left an ambivalent legacy to twentieth-century ethics: the dogmatic idea of a “new” morality of a consequentialist kind, and the fruitful idea that we can argue rationally in normative ethics albeit without shared foundations. Then it reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore’s early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. I stress the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. I argue that PE is more a patchwork of rather diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. I add a comparison with Rashdall’s almost contemporary ethical work, suggesting that the latter defends the same general claims in a different way, one that manages to pave decisive objections in a more plausible way. I end by suggesting that the emergence of Analytic Ethics was a more ambiguous phenomenon than the received view would make us believe, and that the wheat (or some other gluten-free grain) of this tradition, that is, what logic can do for philosophy, should be separated from the chaff, that is, the confused and mutually incompatible legacies of Utilitarianism and Idealism. -/- 23. Edmund Husserl and the a-priori of action. The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl’s project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the a priori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy carried out in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach’s theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that basically sketches the very ideas ‘discovered’ later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section is dedicated to Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of ‘values’ – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler who claimed to Husserl’s legitimate heirs. -/- 24. Bertrand Russell and non-cognitivism. The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of ‘good’, its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with ‘emotive’ meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell’s ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of a rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson’s theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. Last of all, the discussion from the Forties about Hume’s law is described, mentioning Karl Popper’s argument and Richard Hare’s early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- 25. Elizabeth Anscombe and the revival of virtue ethics. The chapter discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. I argue that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. A short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current is given trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot’s and Peter Geach’s critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre’s grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly unavoidable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- 26. Richard Hare and neo-Utilitarianism. The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick’s and Moore’s fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine definitely refuted. A glimpse at this uproarious process is given through two examples. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of Utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This results in preference utilitarianism combined with a ‘Kantian’ version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare’s two-level preference utilitarianism where act utilitarianism plays the function of eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of action-guiding practical device. -/- 27. Hans-Georg Gadamer and rehabilitation of practical philosophy. The post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named ‘Rehabilitation of practical philosophy’ is described. Among the actors of such rehabilitation there were a few of Heidegger’s most brilliant disciples, and Hans-Georg Gadamer is chosen as a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle’s lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger’s lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the central role of the notion of phronesis. -/- 28. Karl-Otto Apel and the revival of Kantian ethics. Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This started, instead than the rehabilitation of prudence, with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. An examination of his argument is some detail is offered, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas’s elaboration on Apel’s theory. -/- 29. John Rawls and public ethics as applied ethics. Rawls’s distinction between a “political” and a “metaphysical” approach to one central part of ethical theory, namely the theory of justice, is interpreted as a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and neo-casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter, namely that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls’ view never will be close – on the basic criteria for judgment. -/- 30. Beauchamp and Childress and bioethics as applied ethics. The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin’s new casuistry. -/- . (shrink)

In 1980, Michel Foucault began a vast project of research on the relationship between subjectivity and truth, an examination of conscience, confession, and truth-telling that would become a crucial feature of his life-long work on the relationship between knowledge, power, and the self. The lectures published here offer one of the clearest pathways into this project, contrasting Greco-Roman techniques of the self with those of early Christian monastic culture in order to uncover, in the latter, the historical origin of many (...) of the features that still characterize the modern subject. They are accompanied by a public discussion and debate as well as by an interview with Michael Bess, all of which took place at the University of California, Berkeley, where Foucault delivered an earlier and slightly different version of these lectures. Foucault analyzes the practices of self-examination and confession in Greco-Roman antiquity and in the first centuries of Christianity in order to highlight a radical transformation from the ancient Delphic principle of “know thyself” to the monastic precept of “confess all of your thoughts to your spiritual guide.” His aim in doing so is to retrace the genealogy of the modern subject, which is inextricably tied to the emergence of the “hermeneutics of the self”—the necessity to explore one’s own thoughts and feelings and to confess them to a spiritual director—in early Christianity. According to Foucault, since some features of this Christian hermeneutics of the subject still determine our contemporary “gnoseologic” self, then the genealogy of the modern subject is both an ethical and a political enterprise, aiming to show that the “self” is nothing but the historical correlate of a series of technologies built into our history. Thus, from Foucault’s perspective, our main problem today is not to discover what “the self” is, but to try to analyze and change these technologies in order to change its form. (shrink)

This paper draws attention to Foucault’s genealogy of critique. In a series of inquiries, Foucault traced the origins and trajectories of critical practices from the ancient tradition of parrhesia to the enlightenment and the (neo)liberal critique of the state. The paper will elucidate the insights of this history and argue that Foucault’s turn to the genealogy of critique also changed the valence of his theoretical assumptions. Foucault developed a more affirmative practice of genealogy that not only discredits truth claims (...) by tracing them back to their inglorious origins. Rather, he presents a politics of truth as a complex interaction of (governmental) power-knowledge and critique that questions the power effects of truth and rationality. This genealogy of critique contributes to current problematizations of critique by thinkers like Boltanski, Latour and Rancière in highlighting the role of epistemological and technical critique of social rationalization and political reason. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Foucault and the Discourse of Sex‐Desire Power and Pleasure Reading Foucault on Pleasures Foucault's Use of Pleasure The Turn to Ancient Greco‐Roman Ethics Why Embrace an Ethics of Pleasures? References.

This paper examines the relevance of Foucault’s later work to debates in contemporary Continental philosophy concerning the problem of the subject. It shows that Foucault shifts attention away from the history of metaphysics and the metaphysics of the subject to an analysis of the concrete forms of institutional practice and embodiment that shape philosophical discourses. As a result, we are able to see this debate in a different light. In particular, we can grasp the deconstruction of the subject, especially as (...) it is articulated by Critchley and Derrida, in the context of a genealogy of philosophy as care of the self and spiritual exercise. The paper concludes by arguing that Foucault’s work forces us to understand philosophical concepts and problems - and the problem of the subject in particular - in light of the contexts of power, knowledge and subjectivity within which they function and against which they struggle. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Subjection and Autonomy: Foucault contra Habermas What Is Fallacious About the Genetic Fallacy? Conclusion References.

Theodor W.Adorno was one of the towering intellectuals of the twentieth century. His contributions cover such a myriad of fields, including the sociology of culture, social theory, the philosophy of music, ethics, art and aesthetics, film, ideology, the critique of modernity and musical composition, that it is difficult to assimilate the sheer range and profundity of his achievement. His celebrated friendship with Walter Benjamin has produced some of the most moving and insightful correspondence on the origins and objects of the (...) Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. This unprecedented collection, devised and assembled by one of Europe's rising social theorists, distills the best from published assessments and responses to Adorno's oeuvre. The collection is divided into 4 volumes: Volume 1: Philosophy, Ethics and Critical Theory Part 1: Negative Dialectics Included here are contributions on the concept of totality in the writings of Adorno and Lukacs; Adorno and Bourgeois Philosophy; the relationship between Adorno and Kierkegaard; Adorno's Critique of Idealism; Adorno and Linguistics; Adono and Habermas. Part 2: Ethics and Redemption This is comprised of contributions on Adorno and Truth; Adorno's Inverse Theology; and Adorno and the Ineffable Part 3: Critical Theory, Ideology Critique and Social Science Included here are contributions on Adorno's relation to the Positivist Dispute; the Popper-Adorno Controversy; Adorno and Empirical Research; and Hermeneutics and Critical Theory. Volume 2: Aesthetic Theory Part 1: Art and Politics in 'Aesthetic Theory' This includes material on the De-Aestheticization of Art; Adorno, Utopia and Mimesis; Adorno and autonomous art; Adorno and Dialectics; Adorno, Marxism and Art; Art and Criticism in Adorno's Aesthetics; Adorno's concept of the Avant-Garde. Part 2: Philosophy of Music This includes contributions on Adorno's music and social criticism; Adorno and nostalgia; Adorno, Heidegger and the meaning of music; Adorno and Wagner. Part 3: On Jazz The material included here addresses questions of Adorno and Popular Music; Adorno's encounter with jazz; Adorno, Jazz and Society; and the reasons for Adorno's apparent hatred of jazz. Volume 3: Social Theory & The Critique of Modernity Part 1: On 'The Dialectic of Enlightenment' Included here are chapters on the dialectic of enlightenment and post-functionalist thought; dialectic of enlightenment as genealogy critique; the relationship between the dialectic of enlightenment, modernity and postmodernity; Adorno's critique of progress; Adorno and theories of subjectivity; and the dialectic of enlightenment and rationality. Part 2: Anti-Semitism This consists of material on Adorno and Horkheimer; and Adorno and Public Sphere Part 3: Popular Culture and Capitalism Included here are contributions on Adorno and Sport; Adorno's alleged left-wing elitism; Adorno's critique of astrology and the Occult; Benjamin and Adorno on Disney; Adorno, Totalitarianism and the Welfare State; and Adorno and Mass Society. Volume 4: Cultural Theory and the Postmodern Challenge Part 1: 'Damaged Life': Exile in America This section includes Leo Lowenthal's insightful recollections of Adorno; Adorno and the primal history of subjectivity; Adorno and Los Angeles; Adorno's relation to American culture; and Adorno's exile in England. Part 2: Film Theory This section includes chapters on Adorno and the Culture Industry; Benjamin, Adorno and Contemporary Film Theory; Adorno, Aesthetics and the Social. Part 3: Wellmer and Adorno Included here are papers on Aesthetic, Psychic and Social Synthesis in Adorno and Wellmer; and New German Aesthetic Theory after Adorno. Part 4: Jameson on Adorno Included here are papers on Jameson, Adorno and the persistence of the Utopian; and a Marxism for Postmodernism Part 5: Modernism and Postmodernism This section contains papers on Adorno, Foucault and the Modern Intellectual; Adorno, Foucault and Two forms of the Critique of Modernity; Adorno and the Habermas-Lyotard Debate; Adorno, Postmodernism and Edward Said; Adorno, Heidegger and Postmodernism; Adorno and the Decline of the Modern Age; The literary process of modernism; Adorno, Tradition and the Postmodern Part 5: The Feminist Response Included here are contributions on Adorno and Judith Butler; Adorno, Art Theory and Feminist Practice; and Gender in the writings of Adorno and Horkheimer. The collection comes with a superb Introduction to Adorno by Gerard Delanty which elucidates the main contributions of this penetrating and enduring thinker. Comprehensive and consistently illuminating, the collection includes the thought on Adorno from some of the most distinguished commentators on social theory. Included here are selections from the writings of Susan Buck-Morss, Martin Jay, Agnes Heller; David Frisby; Johann Arnason; Richard Wolin; Andrew Bowie; Robert Hulnot-Kentor; Leo Lowenthal; Richard Rorty Axel Honneth; Albrecht Wellmer; and Jurgen Habermas. The result is a peerless research resource allowing readers to delve into all aspects of Adorno's extraordinary accomplishments in social thought, philosophy and cultural criticism. It will be required reading for students of the Frankfurt School, Marxism, Critical Theory, Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics and Social Theory. (shrink)

continent. 2.3 (2012): 218–223 Vijay Prashad. Arab Spring, Libyan Winter . Oakland: AK Press. 2012. 271pp, pbk. $14.95 ISBN-13: 978-1849351126. Nearly a decade ago, I sat in a class entitled, quite simply, “Corporations,” taught by Vijay Prashad at Trinity College. Over the course of the semester, I was amazed at the extent of Prashad’s knowledge, and the complexity and erudition of his style. He has since authored a number of classic books that have gained recognition throughout the world. The Darker (...) Nations , a peoples’ history of the Third World, sent defibrillating shockwaves through an academic world that had almost forgotten the epic scope and historic dignity of the non-aligned movement and post-colonial struggles. In his recent, award-winning work, Arab Spring, Libyan Winter , Prashad delves into his capacious knowledge of the Third World to excavate the discourses and narratives surrounding the upheavals of 2011. “Revolutions have no specific timetable,” states Prashad in the opening line of this exciting and provocative look at contemporary events. Instantly, an atmosphere of suspense emerges. The reader is alerted to the problem of history. Does the making of history then involve a suspension of historical time, or is it a continuous narrative structure into which events must eventually be integrated? Arab Spring, Libyan Winter shows that the answer to the question, “How is history made?” lies just as easily in the asking. The first half of the book works through the events that transpired to bring about the explosive popular uprisings of Arab Spring: Tunisia and Egypt, Yemen and Bahrain. But the events are not put together in a cohesive, chronological fashion. Using an uncommonly gripping style more akin to the folk-story motif of the djeli than to traditionally Orientalist academia, Prashad suspends a given situation, points out its components, and traces back the characters and genealogies that define each link before resuming a narrative. Every moment is an end to itself, and an origin of something different. Thus, the making of history becomes the suspension of its own progress, it’s catastrophic 'stability,' in a process of differentiation through inclusion. Empirically, one might suggest that history is a condition of time, and by extension, of the subject, but history is also an eminent producer of the Subject and her concept of time through memory and narrative. Hence, history is often overdetermined by a dominant narrative of the sovereign. The apparently chaotic composition of Prashad’s historicity is, then, an interstitial morphology of resistance. It illustrates that the time to act for the revolutionary lies in the gaps within the dominant historical realities. It points out the sorties of signifiers constituting nothing in the obliterated ruins of history. Through such illuminations, Arab Spring, Libyan Winter breaks through “the surface of history” to elaborate revolution’s snapping synapses, exploding interruptions and breaches, connecting flows. Messianic Politics It is tempting to think, 'History is either singular, or it is diffuse. It is either one coherent factual narrative, or it is comprised of the aletheia of the multitude.' Yet the reader finds Prashad examining the structure of history on multiple levels. For Prashad, world history is shaped by geographically defined political movements, such as communism or national liberation, with historical agents like the working class for the former and the nationalist militant for the latter. Religion, however, is another matter: “Religion has an unshakable eschatology which a post-utopian secular politics lacks.” Within the telos of religion, there appears on the horizon the image of Benjamin’s thoughts on messianic time—time as “a small fissure in the continuous catastrophe,” a break with history, may contain an ultimate redemption of the human beyond the political power struggle. Succoring the split between geo-political and utopian-religious (messianic) time in the context of Arab Spring, Prashad indicates that the base of “the deep desire and commitment to some form of democracy” is forged by the affinity between eschatological Islamist politics with the People. To think about the Subject of messianic time in the context of the lack of a “coherent timetable” for emancipatory politics, it is perhaps best to return to the modern tradition of Martin Luther King, Jr., whose prefigurative blending of liberation theology and emancipatory politics became most important during his works of 1963, the climactic year of “The Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” the March on Washington, and the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church. In “The Letter,” King states the point bluntly: Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was “well timed” in view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant ‘Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.” The timing of rebellious action must not be a part of history. It must change history. The kairos appears spontaneous and untimely in its convulsive, shocking presence, yet it is, deeper still, a path, a longue durée , forged through diligent and rigorous praxis. King put a finer point on the path of historic liberation in his declaration in his 1963 speech at Western Michigan University: “[T]ime is neutral.... Somewhere along the way we must see that time will never solve the problem alone but that we must help time. Somewhere we must see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels on inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God. Without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the insurgent and primitive forces of irrational emotionalism and social stagnation. We must always help time and realize that the time is always right to do right.” Time, then, exists in “the neutral,” while action must turn to the kairos , not only of taking time, but taking the right time. By turning our relation to time into kairos , we move time from its context within history to a duration between histories—the longue dure?e of Messianic time. The implementation of neutrality in this context suggests a broad space of time to extend through the valley of positive and negative. In Roland Barthes’s lectures from 1978, the neutral takes place in this minimal distance of non-conflict that exists outside of two extremes. It is, in the words of Maurice Blanchot, “the non-general, the non-generic, as well as the non-specific.” For Blanchot, the neutrality of time permeates life as death, impassive and beyond control; such is the neutrality of messianic time, which permeates the charge of history, changing the "I" into the "one." The neutrality of time therefore implicates history in a case against extremism, showing that the work of the radical is not to tend to any particular side, but to have the time to navigate through the terrible terrain of history by altering its course, its patterns and rhythms of movement, connection, sociality. Hence, one does not simply “make history,” one alters the course of history in accordance to “the right time.” The historical path toward emerging power is transmitted as a gesture to the outside of history, against history; a gesture as simple as reaching out. Thus a counterhistory, to use Foucault’s term, is brought forward as the guide of time past a point of no return, a Rubicon, the point where the normal path of history falls to the past. The subject, who must be the only true agent of history, facilitates time through helpfulness, and both the Subject and her history become decentered in relation to one another. Yet history negates the neutrality of time. As Barthes discloses, although the neutral is the “thought and practice of the nonconflictual, it is nevertheless bound to assertion, to conflict, in order to make itself heard.” Engaged with history, time is charged with a destiny, and becomes an opposition. As Prashad insists, “For Arab lands, the events of early 2011 were not the inauguration of a new history, but the continuation of an unfinished struggle that is a hundred years old.” The emergence of the Subject during Arab Spring did not conceive of a new history, but changed the path of history toward a different destiny. “Historical grievances combined with inflationary pressures now met with the subjective sense that victory might be at hand—this was not simply a protest to scream into the wind, but a protest to actually remove autocrats from their positions of authority. The facts of resistance had given way to the expectation of revolutionary change.” The negativity of this charge toward “revolutionary destiny” rendered control, as a positive force, seriously lacking. The lack of control lies in the problem that the Subject is not totally detemporalized or timeless, but untimely in her presence. The Subject is untimely, because her work is visionary, and it is only through such visionary work that the Rubicon can be crossed. Still, the crossing of this border is haunted by anxiety over an impending disaster that lays in wait. It is only through the form of what Benjamin calls divine violence, captivated not with the justice of the means, but the ends—the transformation of history—that a revelation of history’s traumatic foundations can be liberated, and patterns and rhythms of time developed throughout obscured traditions awakened. In this situation, the Subject appears to be outside of right, but setting the state to rights. Because her position is correct, in-so-far as the rebelling subject rebels due to a lack of recognition, her representation appears outside of the norm, which is mistaken as right. Therefore, such visionary work must be carried out through obscured traditions, underground, away from the surveillance of empire. Explaining his method from the start along the lines of Marx’s metaphor of the mole, Prashad insists, “It is the burrowing that is essential, not simply the emergence onto the surface of history.” Arab Spring, Libyan Winter is a book on uncharted networks of time, spread out over the 252 pages like an elaborate spider’s web of passages intertwining with and overwhelming the machinery of the state. Although untimely, Arab Spring was not a flash in the pan, or a Facebook or Twitter revolution. Prashad notes that the government’s suspension of these tools led to further radicalism by furthering communications through face-to-face encounters. In existential terms, Arab Spring might be thought of as a revolution of Being over techne , an uprising of the unchartable, infinite potential of the Other. The name of this Other is found in Chance. The faith of the revolution lies in the proper decentering of the subject, its giving to the Other of time, for only with respect to time does history actually appear on the horizon of the subject, rather than as an imposition. This time of historical agency appears as a moment when anything can happen—a revolutionary truth event where everything comes into question while being realized in its Otherness as a community of the people begins anew in the streets amidst discourse, friendship, reconfigurations of hegemony, and a becoming of a constituent power. Throwing a wrench into the gears of the “cobwebbed tradition” of Orientalism, the decentering of history in Arab Spring, Libyan Winter is a defining quality of its impassioned revolutionary cry. But perhaps the most paradigmatic points of the book emerge from the unexpected voices. To make the connection between the particular manifestations of revolutionary demands to the general historic terms of revolution, Prashad quotes an anonymous young Egyptian in Tahrir Square, who reminds us, “[T]he French Revolution took a very long time so the people could eventually get their rights.” Far from timelessness, the historicization of Arab Spring must exist precisely within the most uncanny appearance of time, as something that does not appear to come from the natural state of time as we know it, but in arriving has completely transformed the way that we understand time. Strange Monsters Revolution is never as simple as a revolt from below against a rusting structure of elites trying to remain in power. As with the French Revolution, Arab Spring consisted of complex familial ties, outside interests, and religious factions fighting alongside, often in awkward juxtaposition to, liberals, working class parties, farmers, and students. It is perhaps because of this historically difficult and incongruous composition that the Arabic word for revolution is thawra , referring to the image of the bull, or thawr , which has religious significance as a pagan deity for the Ancient Semitic tribes and Cartheginians. If Daniel Guérin was correct in saying, “Anarchism and Marxism drink from the same spring,” then it is quite a different oasis that drove the thirsty beast of revolution through what Prashad calls, “the Libyan labyrinth.” Recalling Bataille’s Acéphale, the intestinal labyrinth gains significance as the mode of metabolism and rumination in which, “(the Acephale) has lost himself, loses me with him, and in which I discover myself as him, in other words, as a monster.” Unraveling the discourse of the revolution, the flows of power and hegemony—from Qaddafi’s nationalist coup in 1969 to the wars with Chad from 1978 to 1987, the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s to, finally, the War on Terror—we find that the metabolic process of Libyan Winter ends in the production of oil. In a process of what Prashad calls “involution,” Qaddafi’s bellicose policies, along with his attempts to nationalize Islam together with oil, mutated the source of his power, turning his house against itself. Already a divided nation, with its two major cities on opposite geographic sides of the country, Libya became split between two opposed political powers—liberal reformists and staunch nationalists—as Qaddafi’s political disengagement manifested through what can only be described in psychoanalytic terms as a recursive passage a l’act (mysteriously calling Wikipedia “Kleenex,” declaring that opponents drank hallucinogens with their instant coffee, and so on). Prashad declares, “The mercurial style that Qaddafi adopted was not about his personality alone, but also a leader’s natural response to a system that relied upon power brokers whose own loyalty… did not have any ideological commitment to the system.” As in the case of other nations during Arab Spring, the true expression of revolt was an outward exposition of what had inwardly been happening in microcosmic societies throughout the realm—from indigenous tribes to political parties, for a century, the people, partly motivated by (and in resistance to) economic impositions of development, had been changing the traditional social compositions and participating in what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls, “the relative autonomy of the movement from the leaders.” It was this empowerment of political reconfigurations taking place under the context of new democratic assemblages that shocked the elites and evoked such a powerful response. Unlike Qaddafi’s awkward policy choices and rants, real acts of power from the West were clear and decisive. Prashad sets the stages of war and diplomacy, far removed from the deserts, mountains, and cities that forged the backdrop of popular politics. Taking place under the now-classic architecture of the “four pillars” of US interests—oil, the War on Terror, Israel, and the circumvention of Iranian hegemony—we find elites rubbing elbows in “Heliopolist cocktail parties and hushed conferences in Kasr al-Ittihadiya” as well as the Concorde-Lafayette hotel in Paris, which provides the setting for a meeting of anti-Qaddafi figures consolidating their power. These scenes are buttressed with the careful portraiture of key historical actors. As Prashad brings the stage of history to life, we find the diplomats and liberals like Frank Wisner, whose career has brought him from Enron in the late 1990s to the Obama Administration, under the aegis of which he was meeting with Mubarak about military support during Arab Spring. We spy the provocateurs, for instance, gauche cavalier , Bernard Henri-Levy, who telephones Sarkozy from Benghazi about the need for more NATO air strikes. We follow the rebel military establishment as it suffers mysterious deaths and even more mysterious assents (like that of apparent CIA cohort, Khalifa Hifter). In each of these intriguing characters, we find different representations of the security state biopolitique: an oil-injected reification that drives Arab Spring from the resentment of rising food prices to the brink of implosion in Libyan Winter. Reminiscent of the scenes of Cold War soirées represented in old Bond films, the aristocratic fight for oil against democracy that was Libyan Winter presents a harsh truth that the new global crisis is simply the continuation of the old history: the global exploitation of capitalism waged against the imagination of the people. As Benjamin laments, “The labyrinth is the right path for the person who always arrives early enough at his destination. This destination is the marketplace.” Yet, “(t)he labyrinth is the habitat of… a humanity (a class) which does not want to know where its destiny is taking it.” Thus, the labyrinth leads, like the desert, only further into itself. As Blanchot explains, “The desert is even less certain than the world; it is never anything but the approach to the desert.” Only the visionary can take time out of the involution toward oblivion. It is here, in this approach to and escape from history, that we find ourselves within Benjamin’s Golgotha, Blanchot’s desert: A space of indeterminate uncertainty where we become familiar only with our own exile. Blanchot writes, “For the moderated and moderate man, the room, the desert, and the world are strictly determined places. For the man of the desert and the labyrinth, devoted to the error of a journey necessarily a little longer than his life, the same space will be truly infinite, even if he knows that it is not, all the more so since he knows it.” The desert, as allegory, provides an eschatology, a mortality in the destiny of Arab Spring. But any allegory of nature might lead to a labyrinthine eschatology (for example, in Bachelard, the forest presents "a limitless world"); the prescience of the untimely is always an uncanny acceptance of the infinite within the finite—the outside of what is understood. Transgenerational and occupied with the image of the future, the untimely makes otherness its home as it proceeds toward liberation. In the work of helping time navigate this dangerous passage of history, Prashad illustrates that the more violent break with history may have occurred in the peaceable struggles of Tahrir Square, and not in the military clashes of Qaddafi with his former Generals who defected to the CIA and NATO countries. It might be possible to suggest, then, that in the case of Tunisia and Egypt, the historical subject of the people was drawn together in a Dionysian dance of different rhythms in the marvelous realm of the ancients, while we fear that the case of Libya suggests an Apollonian future where time, itself, may lay dying under the machinic hand of history. The properly Nietzschean inversion would follow: time is dead, for history has killed it. Yet, if time is dead, struck down in Golgotha, exposed in the desert, mauled by the thawra , it is only in the present sense that it is rendered impossible outside of the context into which the untimely has thrown us. Thus, if history becomes an art of revolution, life as being-towards-death (death as the provocation of the neutrality of time) becomes what Benjamin calls “the allegory of resurrection” through the glorious ruins of history. Prashad ends his work with a rousing finale: “The time of the impossible has presented itself. In Egypt, where the appetite for the possibilities of the future are greatest, the people continue to assert themselves into Tahrir Square and other places, pushing to reinvigorate a Revolution that must not die… For them the slogan is simple: Down with the Present. Long live the Future. May it be so.&rdquo. (shrink)

This dissertation explores the problematic of "care of the self" in the unpublished later work of Michel Foucault. In his major published works, Foucault studied how subjects are fabricated within relations of power and knowledge. He revealed that modern political power is a "bio-power." Its legitimacy derives from its capacity to nurture individual life. It does this by forging individuals whose bodies, capacities, pleasures, comforts, desires, etc., are intrinsically integrated into the state's productive force. One of the main techniques for (...) bringing about this integration is to incite individuals to talk about their desire, to think of themselves as subjects of desire. This practice of reflecting on oneself in order to acquire and express self-knowledge is "hermeneutic" in nature. It uncovers the hidden truth of the individual. Through this hermeneutic practice individuals fashion their subjectivity around the discovery, expression, liberation and fulfillment of their true desire. Foucault shows that this subject of desire first emerges within the confessional practices and spiritual exercises of Christian ethics. However, his work also revealed that prior to the formation of Christian practices a whole range of possible experiences of ethical subjectivity was to be found in ancient philosophy---relations and practices which were not hermeneutic. ;I argue that Foucault's genealogy seeks to historicize our particular formulation of self-knowledge as a hermeneutic of desire. He finds in ancient philosophy an experience of subjectivity that was "aesthetic" and "poetic" rather than hermeneutic. The foundation of ancient philosophy was the practice of "care of the self" in a philosophical life. This dissertation shows that in his lectures at the College de France from 1982--1984, Foucault develops an ethics of care of the self as a response to modern bio-power and the hermeneutics of desire. His genealogy of philosophy reveals a multiplicity of practices of care of the self and self-knowledge. Rather than being an effect of bio-power, or a true desire, the self of care is a material to be formed and a task to be accomplished. (shrink)

The dissertation project is a study of the rhetoric of "enlightenment" and the philosophy of modernity. It addresses two seemingly unrelated questions: "what is enlightenment?" and "what is May Fourth?" The investigation of these two questions is located in the contexts of Kant-Foucault-Habermas's dialogue on "what is enlightenment?" and Western sinology's re-presentation of Chinese modernity. One of the objectives of the present study is to critique modern sinology's re-presentation of Chinese modernity, which has reduced the latter into (...) a latent statement of the Enlightenment and a derivative language of Reason, and hence, to seek to determine the conditions of possibility to address the question of "what is May Fourth?" ;The study attempts to identify the problematics in the Kant-Foucault-Habermas context, in which enlightenment was treated as an enterprise to bridge the gap between theoretical reason and practical intelligence, reason and unreason, and expert knowledge and everyday praxis. The study suggests that mediation of hermeneutic understanding of text/tradition with political commitment to organize an enlightened society was treated differently in Confucian and modern Chinese political philosophy and historiographical discourse. Examination of that treatment, the study points out, may help provide a framework to further reflect upon some unresolved problems and anticipate some pratical difficulties in the Western genealogy of enlightenment. (shrink)

Foucault rejects the subject as a center, that is to say, as a transparent self-conscious being who gives meaning to his actions. However, ideas about subjects that are thinking and willing autonomously are still functioning within modern culture. Discourses on subjectivity thus call for an archeological and genealogical explanation. This compels Foucault to view subjectivity increasingly not only as a product and a target of power, but also as a source of resistance and as an agent; for Foucault defines power (...) as “actions about actions.” In his latest writings, Foucault starts to define the teleology of his philosophical ethos as the production of new forms of subjectivity, in terms of freedom and autonomy. I argue that Foucault was always particularly concerned with circling (around) transgression, apprehending subjectivity as an aimless self-negation, rather than with a “return of the subject.”. (shrink)

Michel Foucault’s formative years included the study not only of history and philosophy but also of psychology: two years after he took license in philosophy at the Sorbonne in 1948, he took another in psychology, and then obtained, in 1952, a Diplôme de Psycho Pathologie . From his earliest years at the Ecole Normale Superieur he had taken courses on general and social psychology with one of most influential psychologists of the time, Daniel Lagache, who was attempting to integrate psychoanalysis (...) with clinical methods.(Eribon 1991, 42) Foucault’s studies included experimentation and clinical instruction in which patients were presented in an amphitheatre just as in the days of Charcot. For several years after he had received his Diplôme, Foucault continued research in psychopathology, observing practices in mental hospitals, reportedly sometimes volunteering in experiments himself. He purchased the material required to administer Roschach tests, subjecting numerous friends to the inkblots, and became, when it was founded, the honorary president of the French Rorschach organization. Foucault’s first books were on the topic of the psychological characterization of madness and the development of clinical medicine, and his last books addressed the development of psychological norms within the establishment of modern prisons as well as within an increasingly scientific approach to sex. Thus, he worked at the intersections of philosophy and psychology throughout his life. Nonetheless, Foucault reported feeling an intense aversion to psychology no less than to philosophy.(Sheridan 1980, 5) Foucault’s oeuvre is almost exclusively focused on particular knowledges in the human sciences, especially those aspects which pertained to psychological theories of human behavior, capacity, and normative functioning. His historical approach to these, and his emphasis on the role of discourse, is readily reminiscent of Thomas Kuhn’s similarly historical approach to scientific method with its emphasis on the role of paradigms and the untranslatability of paradigm dependent objects.. (shrink)

"My work has had nothing to do with gay liberation," Michel Foucault reportedly told an admirer in 1975. And indeed there is scarcely more than a passing mention of homosexuality in Foucault's scholarly writings. So why has Foucault, who died of AIDS in 1984, become a powerful source of both personal and political inspiration to an entire generation of gay activists? And why have his political philosophy and his personal life recently come under such withering, normalizing scrutiny by commentators as (...) diverse as Camille Paglia, Richard Mohr, Bruce Bawer, Roger Kimball, and biographer James Miller? David M. Halperin's Saint Foucault is an uncompromising and impassioned defense of the late French philosopher and historian as a galvanizing thinker whose career as a theorist and activist will continue to serve as a model for other gay intellectuals, activists, and scholars. A close reading of both Foucault and the increasing attacks on his life and work, it explains why straight liberals so often find in Foucault only counsels of despair on the subject of politics, whereas gay activists look to him not only for intellectual inspiration but also for a compelling example of political resistance. Halperin rescues Foucault from the endless nature-versus-nurture debate over the origins of homosexuality ("On this question I have absolutely nothing to say," Foucault himself once remarked) and argues that Foucault's decision to treat sexuality not as a biological or psychological drive but as an effect of discourse, as the product of modern systems of knowledge and power, represents a crucial political breakthrough for lesbians and gay men. Halperin explains how Foucault's radical vision of homosexuality as a strategic opportunity for self-transformation anticipated the new anti-assimilationist, anti-essentialist brand of sexual identity politics practiced by contemporary direct-action groups such as ACT UP. Halperin also offers the first synthetic account of Foucault's thinking about gay sex and the future of the lesbian and gay movement, as well as an up-to-the-minute summary of the most recent work in queer theory. "Where there is power, there is resistance," Michel Foucault wrote in The History of Sexuality, Volume I. Erudite, biting, and surprisingly moving, Saint Foucault represents Halperin's own resistance to what he views as the blatant and systematic misrepresentation of a crucial intellectual figure, a misrepresentation he sees as dramatic evidence of the continuing personal, professional, and scholarly vulnerability of all gay activists and intellectuals in the age of AIDS. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In “Il faut défendre la société”, Foucault attempted to historicize and criticize Nietzsche’s equating of the social with struggle. In order to do so, Foucault produced a descriptive discursive history of his genealogical project by deploying the method of the critical archaeology. Foucault realized thereinafter that his archaeological exposition of the genealogical discourse in fact laid bare a close historical and conceptual bond between genealogy and modern racial discourses. In the first lectures, Foucault, unearthed the genealogical discourse hidden in (...) the literature written by the nobility as they attempted to resist the centralisation of royal power. In the latter part of his lectures, he described a discursive interplay between genealogy-as-struggle and the biopolitical practices of the modern state. As such, he gave a tentatively description how the modern state inherited and extensively applied the notion of struggle in its biopolitical control on its populations. The immoral and historical consequences of this affinity, resulting in the biopolitics of genocide, warranted Foucault to distance himself from Nietzsche’s concept, which in effect resulted in rethinking the social within the framework of gouvernmentalité, in which struggle was a modality rather than the prime mover of society. (shrink)

In the field of critical philosophy, the view of Michel Foucault has been subject to very extensive discussion. It has been an ongoing puzzlement how he could reject any talk about ahistorical universals and at the same time claim philosophy – at least in its genealogic form – to be of critical importance. How could he claim any analysis to have only local significance, and at the same time take the view that some analyses can show other views to be (...) problematic? According to what standards?A common strategy against Foucault has been to state that he is not as neutral as he claims to be – that underneath his analysis of, say, prison (Discipline and Punish – 1975) or sexuality (The History of Sexuality 1-3 – 1976/1984) there is a hidden universal normativity that shapes his critique of these fields. Another approach to the seemingly paradox claim by Foucault has been to deny the critical aspect of his work. This has been Jürgen Habermas’ strategy – most thoroughly carried out in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985). In the following I will try to articulate a notion of critique that will demonstrate that it nevertheless does make sense to attribute a critical approach to the Foucaultian writings. Foucault’s critical approach has certain difficulties, but I will argue that it at the same time has certain qualities that can broaden the more traditional account of critique that can be extracted from for example Habermas’ writings. This I will do by (II) demonstrating in what sense it is possible for Foucault to maintain a concept of critique, without having to commit himself on universals. I will show that in Foucault’s writings, critique is understood as reality resisting a conceptual grip – critique is a pointing out of a resistance against or response to the understanding activity. Critique is understood as something that is put upon us. After this I will (III) show that Habermas’ opposition to the position of Foucault springs from a focus on critique as an activity between acting agents. This view is seen in his emphasis on communicative actions and validity claims and in his hesitance towards “natural” reality in discursive matters. But as I will show, this hesitance is rather an effect of than a cause to his basic notion of critique: his latest change in view on reality, has not brought a similar change in the concept of critique. Finally, I will (IV) show how both Foucault and Habermas are important in illuminating the notion of critique – that they complement, rather than exclude, each other. (shrink)

This is the first volume of a ground-breaking new work by Jürgen Habermas on the history of philosophy. In this major new work, Habermas sets out the ideas that inform his systematic account of the history of Western philosophy as a genealogy of postmetaphysical thinking. His account goes far beyond a vindication of the enduring relevance of philosophical reflection founded on communicative reason as a source of orientation in the modern world. He contrasts this conception with prominent diagnoses of the (...) supposed crisis of Enlightenment reason and culture that seeks redemption in the affirmation of traditional religious authority (Schmitt), the timeless validity of Greek metaphysics (Strauss), a numinous conception of nature (L with), and an occurrence of being that speaks to us from beyond the mists of pre-Socratic thought (Heidegger). Habermas situates Western philosophy in relation to traditions of thought founded in the major worldviews (Judaism, Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism) that continue to shape contemporary culture and civilization. At the same time, he lays the groundwork for his analysis in the later volumes of the constitutive role played by the discourse on faith and knowledge in the development of Western philosophy, which is the result of the unique symbiosis that Christianity entered into with Greek thought with the Christianization of the Roman Empire. Far from raising claims to exclusivity, completeness or closure, Habermas's history of philosophy, published in English in three volumes, opens up new lines of research and reflection that will influence the humanities and social sciences for decades to come. (shrink)

Michel Foucault (1926–84) invented a new practice of philosophy. His books trace the emergence of some of the concepts, institutions, and techniques of government which delineate the peculiar shape of modern European culture. They include a history of madness, an account of the birth of clinical medicine at the end of the eighteenth century, an archaeology of the modern sciences of language, life, and labor, a genealogy of the modern form of punishment, and fragments of a history of sexuality. These (...) are all historical studies by virtue of the kinds of claim advanced and the documentary evidence adduced to illustrate and support them, but they do not conform to established rules of historiographical method and often invent new objects of historical research. The title chosen by Foucault for the chair he occupied at the Collège de France provides a clue to the distinctive nature of his research: professor of the history of systems of thought. By “thought” he means firstly the forms of theoretical and conceptual reflection developed within philosophy and the human sciences. His early work deals with the history of psychopathology and clinical medicine in a manner which owes much to the approach of French philosopher‐historians of science such as Bachelard and Canguilhem. However, by “thought” Foucault also means the forms of rationality embedded in the everyday practice of administrators, doctors, priests, and private individuals, and expressed in technical manuals, projects for institutional reform, and the writings of moralists. His work on madness, criminal punishment, and sexuality exposes the historical singularity of forms of experience which involve thought in both of these senses. The history of systems of thought thus defines an approach to the workings of a culture rather than a specific level within a given culture. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.4 (2002) 328-344 [Access article in PDF] Spaces of Invention:Dissension, Freedom, and Thought in Foucault Kendall R. Phillips Over the past two decades, invention has become an increasingly difficult concept to discuss. In an age when the free, rational actor has become not only de-centered but viewed as both impossible and undesirable by some social theorists, the traditional conception of invention, especially rhetorical invention, becomes more (...) tenuous. While some continue to promote a rational deliberative model of the human subject—Habermas is a prime example of this school of thought—the harsh and unrelenting critiques of poststructural and postmodern thinkers have cast these recovery efforts in a nostalgic and often negative light. Chief among these critics of the modern, humanist conception of human action is Michel Foucault. Within Foucault's perspective our utterances are governed by underlying rules of discourse formations, our actions are proscribed and authorized by relations of power, and our very conception of our self is circumscribed by technologies of subjectivity. Contained within these intertwined relations of knowledge, power, and subjectivity, the human subject takes on a very different meaning and even the concept of "human subject" is itself a product of these intertwined relations; a product that may, in time, disappear under new relations of discourse and governance.Despite the apparent centrality of a creative human subject to the study of rhetoric, Foucault has taken his place within the study of rhetoric. Of course, neither this incorporation of Foucault nor the observation of its peculiarity is particularly new. The incorporation of Foucault into rhetoric took its most dramatic turn in 1989 with Raymie McKerrow's "Critical Rhetoric" essay and the implications of this union of Foucault and rhetoric were forcefully raised by Barbara Biesecker in "Michel Foucault and the Question of Rhetoric" (1992). These two important essays made the relationship between Foucault and rhetoric most pressing: McKerrow by offering [End Page 328] a practical agenda for a Foucaultian rhetorical perspective and Biesecker by opening a space for reflection on this type of agenda. In the intervening decade, however, the incorporation of Foucault into rhetoric has outstripped the reflection on this incorporation and Foucault now sits as comfortably in the bibliographies of rhetorical scholars as Burke or McKeon or Perelman.The purpose of the present essay is to revisit this relationship between Foucault and rhetoric. I pursue this end not in order to critique McKerrow's project or to outstrip Biesecker's reflections, but in order to press the importance of their earlier arguments. The project of a Foucaultian rhetoric should be taken seriously, seriously enough to keep the peculiarity of this union in the forefront of our minds as we pursue it. My present effort furthers this end by seeking within Foucault a space for invention and, in so doing, asks the question: how might invention be rendered within a Foucaultian framework?My contention is that a space for invention exists within Foucault's studies of knowledge, power, and subjectivity and that this space can be demonstrated by considering the counterpoints to his tripartite understanding of the human condition. The limiting/enabling relations of knowledge/power/subjectivity are counterpointed by three terms that describe the conditions for invention: dissension, freedom, and thought. Before turning to the conditions for these spaces of invention and the unique shape of invention that emerges from them, I will briefly consider previous discussions of Foucault. Power, resistance, and invention Rhetoricians, to be clear, are not the first to be concerned with the apparent foreclosing of the possibility of invention within Foucault. Focusing mainly on dominating relations of power/knowledge/subjectivity, Foucault seems to leave little ground for the creation of new ways of acting, speaking, or being. However, what I call a concern for invention has generally not been expressed as such; rather, in rhetoric and in other fields, criticism of Foucault has been largely couched in terms of resistance. Edward Said (1986), for instance, contends that Foucault's work is "not finally as contestatory, or as oppositional as on the surface it seems to be" (152... (shrink)

O objetivo principal deste artigo é desenvolver uma reflexão a respeito das relações entre a arqueogenealogia das relações entre verdade, poder e discurso, tal como a pratica Michel Foucault, por um lado, e a teoria crítica da sociedade, da Escola de Frankfurt, por outro lado. Essa aproximação é feita por meio de uma reconstrução da crítica de Jürgen Habermas a Michel Foucault, no livro O Discurso Filosófico da Modernidade. The main purpose of this paper is to develop a reflection on (...) the relations between Michel Foucault's archaeo-genealogy of the relationships between truth, power and discourse, and the critical theory of society of the Frankfurt School. The discussion is taken up in the context of Habermas' critique of Foucault in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. (shrink)

Viewing Foucault in the light of work by Continental and American philosophers, most notably Nietzsche, Habermas, Deleuze, Richard Rorty, Bernard Williams, and Ian Hacking, Genealogy as Critique shows that philosophical genealogy involves not only the critique of modernity but also its transformation. Colin Koopman engages genealogy as a philosophical tradition and a method for understanding the complex histories of our present social and cultural conditions. He explains how our understanding of Foucault can benefit from productive dialogue with philosophical allies to (...) push Foucaultian genealogy a step further and elaborate a means of addressing our most intractable contemporary problems. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn Foucault's later works, experience and embodiment become important for explaining the normative constitution of the subject: for norms to be effective, discourses are insufficient – they must be experienced and embodied. Practices of “discipline” inscribe power constellations and discourses into subjective experience and bodies. In his lectures on the Hermeneutics of the Subject, he turns this “violent” form of normative embodiment into an ethical perspective by referring to the Stoic tradition. Even though Foucault never developed a notion of experience (...) and embodiment himself, his ideas can be re-read and complemented from a phenomenological perspective.The article tries to investigate the role of bodily experience and practice in Foucault's Genealogy and to bring it into dialogue with Husserl and Merleau-Ponty's conceptions of the lived body. It will attempt to show that concepts like sedimentation and habituality can help to explain how cultural norms not only influence the way we think abou.. (shrink)

In his later lectures, Foucault analyzes confession as a key exercise of the Christian pastoral power. The pastoral power’s creation of a lifelong obligation to speak the truth of oneself is a ‘prelude’ to modern practices of government, and a key facet of modernity. There has been some confusion regarding the scope of Foucault’s study. Is it medieval Christian confessional practices or Christian obedience itself that is his theme? In this article, I revisit all of the later lectures touching on (...) confession and avowal in order to clarify Foucault’s ambivalence about Christian proto-governmentality. Foucault exposes two regimes of truth, belief and confession, and offer a practice-based, confession-centred history of the pre-modern self. Connecting his lectures to his method of anarchaeology clarifies how the force of truth (the ‘you have to’) is, for Foucault, a fundamental if ambivalent historical-cultural problem of government. (shrink)

Against the two dominant ethical paradigms of continental philosophy–Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of the other and Michel Foucault’s ethics of self-cultivation—The Self-Emptying Subject theorizes an ethics of self-emptying, or kenosis, one that reveals the immanence of an impersonal and dispossessed life without a why. Rather than align immanence with the enclosures of the subject, Dubilet engages the history of Christian mystical theology, modern philosophy, and contemporary theories of the subject to rethink immanence as what precedes and exceeds the very difference between (...) the (human) self and the (divine) other, between the subject and transcendence. By arguing that transcendence operates on life in secular as well as religious domains, the book challenges a dominant distribution of concepts within contemporary theoretical discourse, which associates transcendence exclusively with religion and theology and immanence exclusively with modern secularity and philosophy. -/- The Self-Emptying Subject argues that it is important to resist framing the relationship between medieval theology and modern philosophy as a transition from the affirmation of divine transcendence to the establishment of autonomous subjects. Through an engagement with Meister Eckhart, G. W. F. Hegel, and Georges Bataille, it uncovers a medieval theological discourse that rejects the primacy of pious subjects and the transcendence of God (Eckhart); retrieves a modern philosophical discourse that critiques the creation of self-standing subjects through a speculative rewriting of the concepts of Christian theology (Hegel); and explores a discursive site that demonstrates the subjecting effects of transcendence across theological and philosophical operations and archives (Bataille). Taken together, these interpretations suggest that if we suspend the antagonistic relationship between theological and philosophical discourses and decenter our periodizing assumptions and practices, we might encounter a yet unmapped theoretical fecundity of self-emptying that frees life from transcendent powers that incessantly subject it to their own ends. (shrink)

Although Foucault was clearly a critical thinker, his approach also provides for the possibility of a genealogy of critique. Such an approach problematizes critique, and I trace the emergent problematization of critique in Foucault’s later works, and briefly in Latour and Boltanski. From this I move on to the ‘critical problematic’, that is, how critique operates as a form of power/knowledge, as a discourse that creates subjects through a critical regime of truth and critical truth-games. Specifically, I argue that critique (...) is a discourse which transforms and unmasks other ‘truth-claims’, replacing them with a starker vision of reality, which in the end is also a specific cultural vision. To elaborate this view, I return to Foucault’s discussion of Kant, his late lectures on Cynicism and also on ordo-liberalism. The wider circulation of critical discourses is demonstrated through an analysis of ‘cool’ or critical consumerism. In conclusion, the relationship between critique, crisis and modernity is considered. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetoric and Power: An Inquiry into Foucault’s Critique of ConfessionDave TellOn October 10, 1979, Michel Foucault revised his thesis on confession. On that day, some three years after the publication of his magisterial treatment of confession in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault argued that the Pythagoreans, Stoics, and Epicureans had, before the advent of Christianity, their own practices of confession. Yet these practices, unlike their (...) Christian variants, were not complicit with practices of domination (OS 310, 312). In the context of Foucault’s thought theretofore, in which the confession consistently figured as an essential component in the exercise of modern power, this is a radical shift. In lectures given at both Berkeley and Dartmouth in the fall of 1980, Foucault made similar arguments. On these occasions he argued that Seneca’s De ira constituted a “stoic confession,” the object of which was to enable the subject to “live differently, better, more happily, than other people” (AB 210, 205). Judith Butler captures the gravity of the shift: “In the last years of his life, Foucault returned to the question of confession, reversing his earlier critique in the first volume of the History of Sexuality, where he indicts confession as a forcible extraction of sexual truth, a practice in the service of a regulatory power” (2005, 112).This reversal was short lived. Although Foucault would celebrate ancient Greek techniques of the self for the rest of his life, he would not [End Page 95] long refer to these techniques in terms of confession. Thus, in another reading of De ira, this one in March 1982, Foucault again noted that the Stoics have “confessional practices” that are “very close to what is found in Christianity” (Herm 482). This time, however, he insisted that the Stoic practices were fundamentally different: “However, all these elements seem to me to be profoundly different from what we should call ‘confession’ in the strict, or anyway, spiritual sense of the word” (Herm 365). In The Care of the Self, Foucault again conceded that De ira—what he now called “the most detailed description” of antique practices of the self—looked “at first glance” like a Christian confession, but he again maintained that it is something quite different: “The purpose of the examination is not therefore to discover one’s own guilt, down to its most trifling forms” (CS 61–62). Foucault concluded that the various “discourses of the self”—the confession and the Greek techniques of the self—could not be placed into a single category (see GE 250). Indeed, the “profound difference” (Herm 299) between these two discourses of the self was perhaps Foucault’s most repeated claim of the 1980s (see Herm 222, 237–44, 299, 308; GE 247–48; WS 237; AB 207–8; RFT 27; UP 89; CS 239; SS 5; FI 5, 12; FS 30, 35, 44, 87, 96, 97, 143–45, 147).It is worth asking why Foucault returned so consistently to the distinction between these two discursive forms. This question gains even more relevance for readers of this journal when we remember that, on at least two occasions, Foucault defined one of these forms, the ancient techniques of the self, in terms of its opposition to rhetoric: the techniques of the self, he claimed, are “nonrhetorical” (Herm 368; FS 20). Thus the question that drives this essay is not so much why Foucault attached such importance to the distinction but rather how rhetoric itself might differentiate the confession from the techniques of the self. Stated differently, Foucault’s work on the confession vis-à-vis the technologies of the self provides a valuable opportunity to study the role of rhetoric in Foucault’s thought—not because they are both rhetorical forms but, curiously, because Foucault insists that one is not.In order to foreground the work of rhetoric in Foucault’s thought, I situate his discourses of the self in the context of Nietzsche’s critique of metonymy. Although this may seem arbitrary, it gains initial plausibility from three facts. First, we know that Foucault understood rhetoric in terms of tropes (OT 84; Cooper 1988, 4). Second, we know too that Foucault had a deep... (shrink)

I offer a major reassessment of Foucault’s philosophico-historical account of the basic problems of modernity. I revise our understanding of Foucault by countering the influential misinterpretations proffered by his European interlocutors such as Habermas and Derrida. Central to Foucault’s account of modernity was his work on two crucial concept pairs: freedom/power and reason/madness. I argue against the view of Habermas and Derrida that Foucault understood modern power and reason as straightforwardly opposed to modern freedom and madness. I show that Foucault (...) held a much more complex view of these pairs, a view encapsulated in his term ‘reciprocal incompatibility’. By revising our interpretation of Foucault’s work on modernity in this way, we open the way to much more effective deployments of his critical apparatus. (shrink)

"Clare O'Farrell is to be congratulated on producing a truly magnificent book on the work of Michel Foucault. There are details, insights and observations that will engage the specialist and there is an extensive documentation of Foucault's output. If there is a more comprehensive book on Foucault's work I have yet to see it. I anticipate those teaching and taking courses on Foucault's work will find Clare O'Farrell's book to be an invaluable resource'" - Barry Smart, University of Portsmouth "Dr. (...) Clare O'Farrell has written a marvelous introduction to this Foucault for that ever growing number of readers who are working in what has come to be designated as cultural studies. This volume captures the penetrating interdisciplinary concerns that have made Foucault a guide to so many beyond the frontiers of philosophy and history, beyond the borders of the academic community itself. O'Farrell is an excellent guide to Foucault's exploration of culture, highlighting, as she does, the characteristic insights of his learning: the instability of cultural forms of order, the subversive potential of historical analyses, the variety of true discourses within history, and his commitment to social justice. O'Farrell reveals Foucault as he is: the engaged moralist who survived the twentieth century's systems of total explanation. This is an excellent introduction for the general reader to a passionate mind that continues to spread its influence'" - James Bernauer, Boston College Michel Foucault's work is one of the most influential sources of ideas in the humanities and social sciences today. Clare O'Farrell offers a comprehensive and accessible introduction to Foucault's enormous, diverse and challenging output. Her book provides a range of practical tools and a reference work for readers who wish to understand and apply his ideas at both introductory and advanced levels. This volume includes: - a discussion of Foucault's situation in the contemporary context exploring his role as an iconic thinker, with clear explanations as to why his work is so difficult to come to grips with, and also importantly, why it is of interest to so many people. - the location of Foucault's work within its own historical, social and political setting. - brief summaries in chronological order of all of Foucault's major works, including the more recently published volumes of lectures. - the organization of Foucault's work around five distinct but interrelated series of assumptions which underpin his world view: namely order, history, truth, power and ethics. Ideas for which he is well-known, such as archaeology, genealogy, discourse, discipline, governmentality, the subject and others are defined and discussed within the framework of these five assumptions. - a chronology of Foucault's life, work and times. - a very extensive list of key concepts in Foucault's work with detailed references pointing to where the relevant material can be found in his writings. - a wide-ranging list of resources and a bibliography of Foucault's work for easy consultation. (shrink)

In this dissertation I claim that Michel Foucault is a pro-enlightenment philosopher. I argue that his critical history of thought cultivates a state of being autonomous in thought and action which is indicative of a kantian notion of maturity. In addition, I contend that, because he follows a nietzschean path to enlightenment, Foucault’s elaboration of freedom proceeds from his critique of who we are, which includes a rejection of humanism’s experiential limits. At the same time, and perhaps most (...) importantly, I also suggest that Foucault articulates a posthumanist conception of finitude and being. To begin with, I show that on humanism’s path to edghtenment, which is established by Rousseau, Kant and Hegel and currently advocated by Rawls and Taylor, a philosophy of the autonomous subject who desires self-actualisation through recogrution precedes the epistemologcal and political critiques which generate humanism’s objective, normative and subjective axes of experience. On the basis of Foucault’s archzological, genealogical and, when they operate together, critical historical critiques of these conditions of possibility for autonomy and recogrution, I maintain that humanism fails to teach us how to think or act freelythat is, as critical thought that delivers enhghtenment-and that humanism’s knowledge of the world and its justice in politics necessitate the confined exclusion of those who are different and the submission of subjectivity of those who are normal. In response to the immaturity that is at the heart of humanism, I illustrate that Foucault deploys archeology, genealogy and critical history to excavate his posthumanist, enlightenment alternatives of savoir, pouvoir and ethico-morality. After he relocates an explanation of cause and effect in the human sciences from savioir to the relations between savoir and pouvoir, I explicate how Foucault reconceives, firstly, the way pouvoir is exercised by productive mechanisms, which discipline the body and regulate the citizen, and, secondly, the nature of pouvoir, which he characterises as governmentality, or one’s action upon the actions of others. He then retlunks freedom as the vis-a-vis of pouvoir/savoir, and I demonstrate how critical history reveals that, prior to the hermeneutic relation to self wluch is at the centre of humanism’s conception of moral identity, ethical subjectivity in antiquity is formed through an ascetic, agonistic freedom that is based on a practical relation to self. Foucault uses this as a blueprint for the present, in which an ethico-political state of being autonomous in thought and action is constituted over against our limits of pouvoir/savoir. I thus claim that Foucault’s portrayal as an anti-enlightenment philosopher, who proffers nothing but anormative critique and amoral freedom, represents the perspective of those for whom to be anti-humanism is akin to being antienlightenment. These criticisms are exposed as misguided by the thesis that I verify in this dissertation, which is that critical history qua critique, thence an ontology, namely, Foucault’s critical ontology, brings about maturity and endorses an ehghtenment that is both contra- and post-humanism. (shrink)

This doctoral thesis examines the phenomenon of Filipinization, specifically understood as the ideological construction of a “Filipino identity” or ‘Filipino subject-consciousness” within the highly determinate context provided by the Filipino ilustrado nationalists such as José Rizal, Marcelo H. del Pilar and their fellow propagandists inasmuch as it leads to the nineteenth (19th) century construction of the modern Philippine nation. Utilizing Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive thinking, this study undertakes a genealogical critique engaged on the concrete historical examination of what is meant by (...) the term “Filipino” across a select historical timeline (1864-1898) and the various notions of Filipino identity implied by the different contexts within which the term “Filipino” has been employed. More specifically, it undertakes a selective philosophical excavation of three seminal texts in the history of Filipinization, viz.: 1) the Manifiesto of Padre Jose Burgos; 2) the writings of the Filipino ilustrados in La Solidaridad; and 3) Jose Rizal’s Annotations on Dr. Antonio de Morga’s Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas. -/- The philosophical claim of this work is the idea that Filipinization, taken as the differential construction of Filipino identity, is the effective translation of the colonial epistemic violence of Eurocentric racism and its consequent “horror of absolutism” into the homo-hegemony of Filipino nationalisms. By fetishizing the notion of a carefully constructed and essential “Filipino-identity,” Filipinization and the current nationalist discourses that utilize them, unwittingly, stands complicit with the same colonial violence and hegemony that they wish to combat. This happens precisely when the very structures of colonial oppression, on the ideological and practical levels, are transmogrified into nationalist ideals that assume legal and political power unto themselves in a self-referential and self-legitimating fashion. -/- Three processes will demonstrate the above thesis: first, by examining historical texts and setting itself against established nationalist historiographies, a genealogical analysis of the term “Filipino” reveals it as a pliable signifier whose semantics have evolved through time. From its originary referent in the Spanish criollo (creole), it has come to refer to people who would have been otherwise entirely alien to this class, viz., the mestizos (both Spanish and Chinese), the principalia (native elite), and eventually, the lowland Catholicized natives themselves. The historical hermeneutic of this identity-discourse in Padre José Burgos’ Manifiesto yields the fact that what gives the term “Filipino” its semantic consistency as a class concept is its essential constitution as a Hispanic and Catholic identity. -/- Second, from this semantic identification of the term “Filipino” as a Hispano-Catholic identity, we proceed to clarify the meaning of Filipinization in terms of the nationalist propaganda carried out by the Filipino ilustrados in the fortnightly periodical La Solidaridad. Here, the specific ilustrado construction of Filipino identity as a Spanish citizen (ciudadano Español) is revealed precisely as a political and legal construct that served as the basis for their own politics of social inclusion/exclusion. Filipinization can only be applied to those who have been hispanized and Christianized and never to those tribes who have resisted and remained outside Spanish colonial authority. Filipinization is thus revealed as a process of Hispanization and Christianization whereby the recipients of Spanish colonial hegemony are transformed into the religiously docile bodies of the Spanish Empire. -/- From this highly determinate context, the study proceeds to examine Rizal’s ontological grounding of collective Filipino-ness in the mythological construction of the pre-hispanic past as the source of a unique Filipino ancestrality. In his work on de Morga’s Sucesos, what is revealed is a mythologization that grounds a native, essential Filipino identity within a past unscathed by the Spanish colonial experience. Such mythologization, however, can only be possible through an anachronistic nationalist interpretation of historical data. Here, Filipinization is revealed as an exclusive prerogative, a nationalist program by which Rizal and the ilustrado class can combat the evils and excesses of the Spanish colonial enterprise. Ironically, though, this same struggle for emancipation also became an instrument by which the ilustrado class can retain their unjustified position of power over those who belonged to the colonial underside, thus, securing the possibility of perpetuating their own ilustrado bourgeois class interests. -/- Such discursive complicity is the essence of the myth of Filipinization: it presents nationalist identity discourse as an anti-colonial enterprise while being underlined by an economy of motives designed to cater primarily to the exclusive interests of the elite and ilustrado class. Thus, instead of securing the genuine, inclusive emancipation of all colonial subjects and a more humane existence for the poor and suffering majority, ilustrado nationalism has, ironically, merely reinforced those operative structures of colonial discrimination and oppression when the ilustrados: 1) grounded their racial theory upon the very same discourse of Eurocentric superiority that they are precisely supposed to question and 2) claimed a patrimony over Filipinas as their exclusive sovereign inheritance. These two factors illustrate how the manifest transfer of power from the Spanish Empire to the Philippine sovereign nation (and later as a nation-state) illustrate how Filipinization merely has transmogrified the face of Spanish colonialism into its new, subtle, and worse form in Filipino nationalism. -/- In this vein, the existence of the 19th century modern Philippine nation merely masked and deferred the crisis that was supposed to transfer power from the Spanish Empire to the multitude of the poor and suffering native indio majority. This crisis became all the more difficult to address be-cause of the duplicitous character of the discourse of Filipinization itself. It has not only effectively transferred power into the hands of the nationalist elite but also captured authentic emancipatory discourse within the identity-trap against which it can only hope to get out. This study concludes with the claim about the impossibility of ever escaping and overcoming the epistemic and practical violence necessarily contained within the historical discourse of colonialism. Or simply, we have no language or discourse that would enable us to overcome the complicity of Filipinization with the very (epistemic) violence against which it has set itself. (shrink)

Unruly Practices brings together a series of widely discussed essays in feminism and social theory. Read together, they constitute a sustained critical encounter with leading European and American approaches to social theory. In addition, Nancy Fraser develops a new and original socialist-feminist critical theory that overcomes many of the limitations of current alternatives. First, in a series of critical essays, she deploys philosophical and literary techniques to assess the work of Michael Foucault, the French deconstructionists, Richard Rorty, and Jürgen Habermas. (...) Then, in a group of constructive essays, she incorporates their respective strengths in a new critical theory of late-capitalist political culture. Fraser breaks new ground methodologically by integrating the previously divergent insights of poststructuralism, critical social theory, feminist theory, and pragmatism. Thematically, she deals with varied forms of dominance and subordination in modern, industrial, late-capitalist societies. These themes are integrated in an original theory of 'the politics of need interpretation.' This concept becomes the linchpin of the socialist-feminist critical theory. (shrink)

In this article, I engage with the ways in which disability is governed within the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) (United Nations 2000). Using a Foucauldian perspective on the governing of populations in modern states (Foucault 1991), I problematise this politics of disability and development by interrogating the ways in which biopower, through the constructions of modern development frameworks, has shaped our understanding of disability and impairment. I pursue this historical trajectory by tracing the emergence of the Global Burden of Diseases (...) (GBD), a global study developed by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Bank in the 1990s (Murray and Lopez 1996). The forms of knowledge emerging in these global frameworks shed light on genealogies of disability in the twenty-first century. By re-visiting a postcolonial critique of Foucault’s conception of power in the context of Third World’s struggles for liberation (Said 1986), I suggest that a Foucauldian critique in disability and development could be deepened through its engagement with postcolonial studies. A critical and genealogical perspective on disability and development, I argue, is useful for understanding the government of disability and impairment in the intersections of global and local histories. (shrink)

In Read My Desire, Joan Copjec stages a confrontation between the theories of Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault, protagonists of two powerful modern discourses - psychoanalysis and historicism. Ordinarily, these discourses only cross paths long enough for historicists to charge psychoanalysis with an indifference to history, but here psychoanalysis, via Lacan, goes on the offensive. Refusing to cede historicity to the historicists, Copjec makes a case for the superiority of Lacan's explanation of historical process, its generative principles, and its complex (...) functionings. Her goal is to inspire a new kind of cultural critique, one that would be "literate in desire," that would be able to read what is inarticulable in cultural statements. Choosing a variety of battlegrounds, from historical phenomena - the 40,000 unsettling photographs of Moroccan drapery taken by Lacan's mentor, G. G. de ClA©rambault; the coincidence between vampire literature and the eighteenth-century imperative to breast-feed; the recurrent emptiness of urban spaces in film noir; the rise of democracy and questions of human rights - to theoretical concepts such as the gaze, cause, and sexual difference, Copjec imagines the blows that each contender might strike. Although Lacan emerges the victor, one has a sense that for Copjec the contest is close, that she is interested not in simply dismissing Foucault but in seizing his theory at those moments when its concerns and strategies are similar to Lacan's. She is intent on understanding how two compelling theories come to diverge, how small differences distort common assumptions. Establishing the links between psychoanalysis and critical philosophy, Copjec treats psychoanalysis not as a private language but as the mother tongue of modernity. She thus makes Lacan's famous "return to Freud" a return, as well, to the best principles of the Enlightenment. By this maneuver she forces us to question the historicist dialect that we have been taught to speak and that we all but take for granted and to regret the loss in it of psychoanalysis's more rousing accents. (shrink)

In this book Sergey Horujy undertakes a novel comparative analysis of Foucault s theory of practices of the self and the Eastern Orthodox ascetical tradition of Hesychasm, revealing great affinity between these two radical subject-less approaches to anthropology. As he facilitates the dialogue between the two, he offers both an original treatment of ascetical and mystical practices and an up-to-date interpretation of Foucault that goes against the grain of mainstream scholarship. In the second half of the book Horujy transitions from (...) the dialogue with Foucault to his own work of Christian philosophy, rooted in -- but not limited to -- the Eastern Christian philosophical and theological tradition. Horujy s thinking exemplifies the postsecular nature of our contemporary period and serves as a powerful invitation to think beyond religious-secular divides in philosophy and Eastern-Western divides in intellectual history. (shrink)

This paper argues that there is continuity in Foucault?s thought, as opposed to the common division of his work into three phases, each marking a distinct field of research - discourse, power, subject. The idea is that there are no radical turns in his work that justify this division; rather, there is a shift of focus: all crucial concepts are present in all periods of his thought and in all of his undoubtedly differently-toned and oriented works. This is shown through (...) examining the characteristics of archaeology and genealogy, their relation, as well as the relation of discursive practices and strategies of power to knowledge. The retrospective and interpretation intend to shed light on the constant interplay between concepts that demonstrate continuity in Foucault?s thought. The viewpoint, based in the integrity of Foucault?s work, offers a better starting point for understanding certain aspects of his theories. (shrink)

Michel Foucault introduced a new form of political thinking and discourse. Rather than seeking to understand the grand unities of state, economy, or exploitation, he tried to discover the micropolitical workings of everyday life that have often founded the greater unities. He was particularly concerned with how we understand ourselves psychologically, and thus with how psychological knowledge developed and came to be accepted as true. In the course of his writings, he developed a genealogy of psychology, an account of psychology (...) as a historically developed practice of power. The problem such an account raises for much of traditional philosophy is that Foucault's critique of psychological concepts is ultimately a critique of the idea of the mind as a politically neutral ontological concept. As such, it renders politically suspect all forms of subjective foundationalism, and the epistemological justification for Foucault's own writings is then called into question. Drawing on the writings of such Anglo-American philosophers as Wilfrid Sellars and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Todd May refutes the idea that Foucault's critiques of knowledge, and especially psychological knowledge, undermine themselves. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to clarify the relation between genealogy and history and to suggest a methodological reading of Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals. I try to determine genealogy's specific range of objects, specific mode of explication, and specific textual form. Genealogies in general can be thought of as drastic narratives of the emergence and transformations of forms of subjectivity related to power, told with the intention to induce doubt and self-reflection in exactly those readers whose (collective) history is (...) narrated. The main interest in understanding the concept of genealogy and revisiting Nietzsche's introduction of it into philosophy lies in understanding how a certain way of writing and a certain textual practice function that successfully call into question current judgments, institutions and practices. Nietzsche's example, I argue, can provide a paradigm for a critical practice that accounts for historical processes of subject formation in terms of power and turns them against given forms of subjectivity. (shrink)

One of the fundamental issues in 20th century philosophy is of the nature of individual subjective experience. I seek to show how this “nature” is revealed and hidden by a historical process outlined in History of Madness by Michel Foucault. Foucault’s philosophical and anthropological engagement with the experience of madness in The Modern Age functions as a useful tool towards this end. The psychologisation and medicalization of madness in the 19th century allowed for an endless discourse on madness. This in (...) turn permitted the language of the mad to burst open from its silence, historically present since the Great Confinement. This language of madness expressed itself poetically and artistically, thus revealing the paradoxical essence of the nature of human subjectivity as well as the particularity of its expression in the Modern Period. This particularity is elucidated from a genealogical account of the births of subjectivity and objectivity. I proceed to use this genealogy in conjunction with the language of madness to posit a prescriptive theory for aesthetic engagement. The essay seeks to show how the aesthetic experience can aid in the affirmation of the individual’s modern subjective reality. Thusly, the “goal” of the essay is to reveal affirmation, i.e., amor fati, the love of fate. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Scriptural AuthorityA Buddhist PerspectiveShi ZhiruLike gold that is melted, cut, and polished, So should monks and scholars Analyze my words [before] accepting them; They should not do so out of respect.1As other papers in this volume have already noted, there is a crisis of authority in modern religion, particularly in the West. One defining characteristic of modernity is a deep sense of rupture from the old, from the traditional, (...) which is compounded by a heightened awareness of the subjectivity of self.2 Therefore, in the age of modernity, or postmodernity, critical and skeptical questioning of forms of religious authority is almost inevitable. While the crisis of religious authority is certainly enhanced in modernity, I would argue that the crisis of authority has always been part and parcel of religious innovation and transmission in Buddhist history. Critical self-reflection and skepticism of scriptural authority were present already in early Buddhism; at various junctures throughout Buddhist history, attitudes toward scriptural authority were often renegotiated in connection with major religious changes that in turn were usually prompted by larger social and historical changes. As the critical theorist Jürgen Habermas points out, “the term ‘modern’ again and again expresses the consciousness of an epoch that relates itself to the past of antiquity, in order to view itself as the result of a transition from the old to the new.” 3 Defined in this manner, the bridging of the “modern” and the past is not unique to the so-called epoch of modernity or postmodernity, but has occurred repeatedly throughout different historical periods.This paper discusses different junctures in Buddhist history when scriptural authority was problematized as part of self-reflection and criticism of the “tradition.” Rethinking the authority of scriptures often involves juxtaposing it against the authority of religious experience, and such reconsideration typically took place as part of religious change that unfolded in different sociocultural and geographical environments. It is tempting to immediately equate “religious experience” in the early Buddhist texts to the prevalent understanding of this term in the modern world, but one must caution that modern definitions and discourse on the topic are largely shaped [End Page 85] by post-Enlightenment ideals and rhetoric in Western religious history, which may not be applicable to traditional Buddhist cultures.4 Hence, it is necessary to unpack the range of premodern Buddhist understanding of “religious experience” according to its contextual references, and not hasten to assume a necessary polarity between the unmediated experience and scriptural exegesis that is generally assumed in modern discourse. Rather than a singular voice for the Buddhist position on scriptural authority, it is important to acknowledge the polyphony of voices and perspectives, sometimes even contradicting one another, in different forms of Buddhism. It is thus critical to contextualize the multiple voices within the different historical and religious circumstances that engendered a particular perspective.It should be noted that my discussion is hardly intended to be a comprehensive survey, but focuses on three examples: early Buddhism, early Mahāyāna, and Chan Buddhism. They are chosen because they aptly illustrate how Buddhists reconceived scriptural or textual authority as part of a critical rethinking of Buddhist thought and practice. Moreover, while religious experience was regularly invoked to undermine the normative scriptural authority of the time, nevertheless, in all the examples considered in this paper, the undermining of “old” scriptural authority gave way to new scriptural or literary authorities. This prioritization of religious experience in reality rarely excludes scriptural or textual authorities, but was often adopted for polemical and rhetorical purposes. The paper concludes with an attempt to broaden the understanding of Buddhist scriptural authority by highlighting the authority of scriptures as material objects, a perspective that has been largely neglected in comparative cross-cultural studies of scriptures.5 On a cautionary note, I am using the word “scripture” in a broad sense to mean the body of sacred texts accepted as the authority by a given religious tradition. As historians of religion have noted, it is necessary to dissociate sacred texts (particularly those of Asian religions) from the concept of “scripture,” which in its literal sense, as used to discuss Abrahamic religions, means the “written word... (shrink)

This book punctuates the moments of crisis in continental thought from the foundational crisis of reason in Husserl’s call for a rigorous science of phenomenology to the current crisis of postmodernism and its rejection of Husserl’s metanarrative of history and rationality. The mediating links between these moments is the centrality of the epochal history of Being, the power of cultural and disciplinary practices, and the dispersal of meaning in the post-Husserlian and post-subjective philosophies of Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, and others. Included (...) here are the thoughts of leading scholars who critically discuss Husserl’s analysis of the crisis of Western thought and the importance of the concepts of “world” in Husserl’s early writings. The authors analyze the deprivileging of philosophy as social critique through the text of Husserl, Habermas, Foucault, and recent feminist theory. They examine the end of the epistemological and morally autonomous subject in continental thought. Together, these thoughts articulate multiple points or moments of crisis without cure or end. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: The way in which Foucault confronts Husserl helps to highlight the instance that drives Foucauldian research and its current legacy. Foucault inscribes his work through Husserl within a broader tradition, namely, that of the critical thinking that has crossed all of modernity from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment and up to phenomenology. His main legacy can be identified precisely in the way he relaunches and radicalises this tradition by intensifying its critical gaze. We will follow the steps of (...) The Crisis of European Sciences to evoke the underlying purposes of Husserl’s work, showing how his genealogical analysis of scientific knowledge, as a mix of historically determined practices, is guided by the ethical aim of self-determination. Later we will show how Foucault takes up this instance in a completely original way, and we will analyse which analogies and differences can be traced between the two authors’ approaches to the problem of an individual’s self-determination in his relationship with the network of knowledge-power in which he is immersed. In fact, both authors consider that there can be no emancipation and self-determination of the individual without a preliminary historical-critical retrospective on knowledge and on the ways in which its contents have been constituted. But this retrospective, which we could define generically as genealogical (genetic-phenomenological in Husserl’s terms), is played out differently by the two authors and implemented by Foucault with a greater degree of radicalism. (shrink)

TWENTIETH-CENTURY ETHICS. AFTER NIETZSCHE -/- Preface This book tells the story of twentieth-century ethics or, in more detail, it reconstructs the history of a discussion on the foundations of ethics which had a start with Nietzsche and Sidgwick, the leading proponents of late-nineteenth-century moral scepticism. During the first half of the century, the prevailing trends tended to exclude the possibility of normative ethics. On the Continent, the trend was to transform ethics into a philosophy of existence whose self-appointed task was (...) that of describing the human condition as consisting of choices, as unavoidable as arbitrary, without any attempt at providing criteria for making such choices. In the Anglo-Saxon countries, the heir of ethics was a philosophy of morality, that is, an analysis of the language of morality that intended to clarify valuations without trying to justify them. 1958 was the year of the normative turn that led to the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy, a turn followed by decades of controversies between distinct kinds of normative ethics: utilitarian, Kantian, virtue ethics. While the controversy was raging, a quiet revolution took place, that of applied ethics which surprisingly dissolved the controversy's very subject matter by providing methods for making convergence possible on intermediate principles even when no agreement was available about first principles. The normative turn and the revolution of applied ethics have led us, at the turn of the century, to a goal that was quite far from the starting point. Instead of scepticism and relativism that was the fashion at the beginning of the century, at the beginning of the third millennium impartial and universal moral arguments seem to hold the spot being supported, if not by a final rational foundation, at least by reasonableness, the most precious legacy of the Enlightenment. -/- ● TABLE OF CONTENTS -/- ● I Anglo-Saxon philosophy: naturalism 1. Dewey beyond evolutionism and utilitarianism 2. Dewey and anti-essentialist moral epistemology 3. Dewey and naturalist moral ontology 4. Dewey and normative ethics of conduct and function 5. Perry and semantic naturalism -/- ● II Anglo-Saxon philosophy: ideal utilitarianism and neo-intuitionism 1. Moore's critique of utilitarian empiricism 2. Moore on the naturalistic fallacy 3. Moore on the nature of intrinsic value 4. Moore on ideal utilitarianism 5. Prichard on the priority of the right over the good 6. Ross's coherentist moral epistemology 7. Ross's moral ontology: realism, pluralism, and non-naturalism 8. Ross's normative ethics of prima facie duties -/- The chapter reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore's early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. It stresses the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. It argues that PE is more a patchwork of somewhat diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. -/- ●III Anglo-Saxon philosophy: non-cognitivism 1. The Scandinavian School, the Vienna circle and proto-emotivism 2. Wittgenstein and the ineffability of ethics 3. Russell's and Ayer's radical emotivism 4. Stevenson and moderate emotivism 5. Stevenson and the pragmatics of moral language 6. Stevenson and the methods for solving ethical disagreement 7. Hare and prescriptivism The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of 'good', its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with 'emotive' meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell's ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson's theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. A section reconstructs the discussion from the Forties about Hume's law, mentioning Karl Popper's argument and Richard Hare's early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- ●IV Anglo-Saxon philosophy: critics of non-cognitivism 1. Neo-naturalism and its objections to the naturalistic fallacy argument 2. Objections to Hume's law 3. Clarence Lewis and the pragmatic contradiction 4. Toulmin and the good reasons approach 5. Baier and moral reasons 5. Baier, social moralities and the absolute morality 6. Baier and the moral point of view 7. Baier and the contents of absolute ethics -/- ● V Continental philosophy: the philosophy of values 1. Max Weber and the polytheism of values 2. Phenomenology against psychologism and rationalism 3. Reinach and the theory of social acts 4. Scheler and the material ethics of values 5. Hartmann and the ontology of values 6. Plessner, Gehlen and the Philosophische Anthropologie -/- The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl's project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the apriori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy conducted in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach's theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that sketches the ideas 'discovered' later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section discusses Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of 'values' – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler, who claimed to be Husserl's legitimate heirs. -/- ● VI Continental philosophy: the critics of the philosophy of values 1. Freud, the Superego and Civilization 2. Heidegger on original ethos against ethics 3. Sartre and de Beauvoir on authenticity and ambiguity 4. Adorno and Horkheimer on emancipation and immoralism -/- ●VII Post-liberal theologians and religious thinkers 1. Barth on the autonomy of faith from ethics 2. Developments of Reformed moral theology after Barth 3. Bonhoeffer on the concrete divine command and ethics of penultimate realities 4. Developments of Reformed and Catholic moral theology after world war II 5. Baeck and the transformation of liberal Judaism 6. Rosenzweig against liberal Judaism 7. Buber and religion as the vital lymph of morality 8. Heschel and Judaism as a science of actions -/- The chapter examines the main protagonists of Christian theology and Jewish religious thinking in the twentieth century. It stresses how the main dilemmas of contemporary philosophical ethics lie at the root of the various path of inquiry taken by these thinkers. -/- ● VIII Normative ethics: neo-Utilitarianism 1. The discussion on act and rule utilitarianism 2. Hare on two-tiered preference utilitarianism 3. Harsanyi, Gauthier and rational choice ethics 4. Parfit, utilitarianism and the idea of a person 5. Brandt and indirect conscience utilitarianism -/- The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick's and Moore's fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine refuted. Two examples give the reader a glimpse at this uproarious process. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This transformation results in preference utilitarianism combined with a 'Kantian' version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare's two-level preference utilitarianism, where act utilitarianism plays the function of the eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of an action-guiding practical device. -/- ● IX Normative ethics: neo-Aristotelianism and virtue ethics 1. Hannah Arendt, action and judgement 2. Hans-Georg Gadamer and phronesis 3. Alasdair MacIntyre on practices, virtues, and traditions 5. Stuart Hampshire on deliberation 6. Bernard Williams and moral complexity 7. Feminist ethics -/- Sect 1 reconstructs the post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named 'Rehabilitation of practical philosophy' is described. Heidegger's most brilliant disciples were the promoters of this Rehabilitation. Hans-Georg Gadamer is a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle's lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger's lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the significant role of the notion of phronesis. Sect 3 discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. It argues that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. The chapter gives a short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot's and Peter Geach's critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre's grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly inevitable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- ● X Normative ethics: Kantian and rights-based ethics 1. Dialogical constructivism 2. Apel, Habermas and discourse ethics 3. Gewirth and rights-based ethics 4. Nagel on agent-relative reasons 5. Donagan and persons as ends in themselves Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This current started with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. The chapter offers an examination of his argument in some detail, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas's elaboration on Apel's theory. -/- ● XI The applied ethics renaissance 1. Elisabeth Anscombe on the atom bomb 2. From medical ethics to bioethics 3. Rawls and public ethics 3. Nozick, Dworkin and further developments of public ethics 5. Sen and the revival of economic ethics -/- The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin's new casuistry. The chapter argues that Rawls's distinction between a "political" and a "metaphysical" approach to the theory of justice, one central part of ethical theory, is a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and the new casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter. The idea is that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls' view never will be close – on the essential criteria for judgment. -/- ● XII Fin-de-siècle metaethics 1. Deontic logics 2. Anti-realism 3. External realism 4. Internal realism 5. Kantian constructivism -/- The chapter illustrates the fresh start of meta-ethical discussion in the Eighties and Nineties and the resulting new alignments: metaphysical naturalism, internal realism, anti-realism, and constructivism. (shrink)

This chapter begins with an exposition of Foucault's genealogical account of critique as an untheorized attitude and mode of existence, that of being critical. Foucault finds the sources of philosophical critique in practices of resistance to politicized forms of pastoral power transposed from Hebraic and Christian traditions at the time of the Protestant Reformation. The next section explores Foucault's identification of the first theoretical formulation of this attitude of being critical in Kant's essay “ What is Enlightenment?”. The ensuing (...) section sketches Foucault's reading of Kant's piece, with an eye to the distinction between the transcendental version of critique practiced in the three Critiques, and critique as Enlightenment, the attitude characterized by the will not to be poorly or excessively governed. Finally, Foucault's analysis of modernity is presented as a model of practicing the self, a “limit attitude” emblematic of the exercise of freedom. (shrink)

This essay focuses on three moments in Foucault's lifelong engagement with the pressing political question of the relationship between power and the subject. The first moment involves Foucault's examination of madness and Foucault's account of the relationship between the social‐institutional and conceptual exclusion of madness and the constitution of the rational subject in modernity, as this is articulated in the History of Madness (HM). The second moment focuses on Foucault's later account of subjection and normalization, as presented in Foucault's famous (...) genealogical works, Discipline and Punish (DP) and History of Sexuality (HS). Foucault's lectures on Psychiatric Power (C‐PP) serve as a bridge between these first two moments. The third moment involves Foucault's exploration of technologies of the self in the context of ancient Greek and Roman ethics. There is a movement to Foucault's thought from madness as the condition of impossibility of thought to disciplinary subjection to the Stoic idea of conversion. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Healing Powers and Modernity: Traditional Medicine, Shamanism, and Science in Asian SocietiesE. N. AndersonHealing Powers and Modernity: Traditional Medicine, Shamanism, and Science in Asian Societies. Edited by Linda H. Connor and Geoffrey Samuel. Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey, 2001. Pp. xiii + 283. Hardcover.Healing Powers and Modernity: Traditional Medicine, Shamanism, and Science in Asian Societies, edited by Linda H. Connor and Geoffrey Samuel, consists of an Introduction, by (...) the first editor, and eleven case studies. The latter are short ethnographic studies of particular communities or healers in East and South Asian countries. All of these are well-written, detailed accounts of particular healing contexts and behaviors. Several are by first-rate veteran ethnographers, such as Laurel Kendall (writing-as usual-on Korean shamans), Mark Nichter (India), Carol Laderman (Malaya), and Geoffrey Samuel (Tibet). Others are by younger scholars, such as Amanda Harris (the Iban of Sarawak), who are carrying on the great tradition. Other essays by Kalpana Ram (India), Marina Roseman (the Temiar of Malaya), Cynthia Hunter (Indonesia), Sydney White (the Naxi of China), Craig Janes (Tibet), and Vincanne Adams (Tibet) complete the picture. All are fine ethnographic sketches.The unifying theme is a classic anthropological one: traditional, small-scale, indigenous traditions meet international forces of change. Inevitably, the former must accommodate to the overwhelmingly greater wealth and power of the agents of the latter. In the medical arena, nations often push international biomedicine to the exclusion of other modes. In the nations under study here, things are a bit more complex; all have their own elite medical traditions, some much changed by contact with biomedicine (as in the case of China's "Traditional Chinese Medicine," with capital letters; it is a new invention, in spite of the name). So local indigenous healers have to accommodate not only to some much-altered form of biomedicine; they usually have to accommodate also to some much-altered form of their country's elite medicine. They improvise, often with striking success. The spirits of the forest are joined by the spirit of canned sardines (see Roseman's chapter), but spiritual healing practice continues.Naturally, this is confusing, and here the book begins to break down a bit. "Modernity" as a concept is taken over from the writings of Foucault, de Certeau, Homi Bhabha, and the like, which are by no means consistent or clear on its meaning. And the authors of this book are far too sophisticated to think of "modernity" as any one thing or as anything at all simple. They are, perforce, left to say that modernity-especially as written up at enormous length and vagueness in the works of the authorities cited-is too complex to address here. (Someone more irreverent might even suggest that "modernity," if indeed it cannot be tightly defined, is not a concept worthy of much attention.) This leaves the book rather undertheorized.Moreover, the authors follow the aforementioned authorities in leaving out bio-scientific considerations, even from descriptions of local modernizing discourses. One wishes for some biomedical diagnoses of cases, for example, for background data on disease incidence, infant and maternal mortality, nutrition, and other basic health concerns. [End Page 702]A reviewer usually should not complain about what is not treated in a book, but in some cases here, stories really need rounding out. Laurel Kendall speaks of Korean folkloristic interest in shamans, but does not mention the fascinating and hotly debated ideas about shamanism as the fount of Korean morality and fine art. Geoffrey Samuel puts discussion of China's brutal crushing of Tibetans and their culture "beyond the scope of this chapter" (p. 215), which deprives the reader of serious consideration of the most obtrusive force shaping Tibetan medical practice today.Such quibbles are minor. These compelling studies of local healers caught in global currents can stand on their own. [End Page 703]E. N. AndersonUniversity of California, RiversideCopyright © 2006 University of Hawai'i Press... (shrink)