Foucault’s notion of discourse entails the relationship between “knowledge of the truth” (dialectic) and “practice of the soul” (psychagogy) which is an art of true discourse. These relations bring out the parrhesiastic nature of the philosopher who engages in a true discourse. However, it can be noted that Foucault denies assuming knowledge of truth as the precondition of discourse. Truth is not known to the speaker prior to the utterance of the statements he makes. If the discourse of truth is to be analyzed the “truth” must be regarded as a permanent function of discourse. This suggests that discourse and truth goes hand and hand. Therefore “dialectic” and “psychagogy” do not determine the speaker’s ability when he/she makes a statement
To read Damasio's critique alongside Stephen Gaukroger's remarkably rich intellectual biography of Descartes, however, is to realize that Damasio could just as aptly have titled his book "Descartes' Vision." As Gaukroger points out, Descartes was reviled during his lifetime and for a century after his death not for his dualism but for his materialism. Only when the history of philosophy was rewritten in the nineteenth century as the story of epistemology did Descartes come to bear the double designation of being both the "father" of modern philosophy and the ranking nativist who visited upon us the catastrophic separation of mind from body and of reason from emotion. These labels are essentially caricatures that distort the actual complexity of what Descartes struggled to work out in his cognitive theory. Gaukroger reconstructs this struggle for us, sometimes on a month-by-month basis, showing how Descartes shuttled back and forth between an account of the body and the pursuit of the mind.
Foucault and Nietzsche challenge the hidden purposes of historians in their search for origins, demonstrating that an accurate understanding of history rectifies one of any beliefs of moral origins. In this paper, I will elaborate what Foucault thinks an accurate understanding of history regarding punishment truly is. I am going to clarify this concept by focusing on the first chapter of Foucault’s book, Discipline and Punish.
Foucault capitalizes that power and knowledge contribute to the discourse of sex; he discusses how people in power controlled this discourse to repress sex entirely. Foucault talks about the repressive hypothesis in his book. The repressive hypothesis states that whoever holds the power, also controls the discourse on sexuality. Specifically, those in power, according to the repressive hypothesis, exercise to repress the discussion of sex. In addition, Foucault comments that knowledge represents power. Whoever has the power can dictate the language of the population, thus this causes powerful people to also regulate the knowledge of the population. Although Foucault does not agree with every aspect that the repressive hypothesis exclaims, he agrees about the timing of when people started to repress sex. With rise of the bourgeoisie in the 17th century, a rise in tighter control about sex also took place. Foucault stated that the discourse of sex remained
In this essay I argue that it is Michel Foucault Cynic parrhesia that is more adept or able to create an atmosphere where we are only forced to ask ourselves to reexamine our political responsibility within our society. In Foucault’s Freedom of Speech given at the University of California he discusses this topic of parrhesia in great length describing what it meant to the Greeks and how they interpreted it using examples from them when used in such little texts. After describing this in detail with examples Foucault later describes that it can lead to more than just that that we can see two forms of parrhesia in Cynic and Socratic the second coming from excerpts in Socrates however it is the Cynic for me that is more interesting and riskier form that can help us understand this further.
In this essay I will be examining the logical impasse of not being able to attain certain knowledge without accepting the certainty of his sense of reason the meditator faces in meditations on first philosophy and discuss possible interpretations of the text that would explain the meditator’s use of circular argument.
(Flynn 1996, 28) One important aspect of his analysis that distinguishes him from the predecessors is about power. According to Foucault, power is not one-centered, and one-sided which refers to a top to bottom imposition caused by political hierarchy. On the contrary, power is diffusive, which is assumed to be operate in micro-physics, should not be taken as a pejorative sense; contrarily it is a positive one as ‘every exercise of power is accompanied by or gives rise to resistance opens a space for possibility and freedom in any content’. (Flynn 1996, 35) Moreover, Foucault does not describe the power relation as one between the oppressor or the oppressed, rather he says that these power relations are interchangeable in different discourses. These power relations are infinite; therefore we cannot claim that there is an absolute oppressor or an absolute oppressed in these power relations.
You’re sitting alone in the café drinking your coffee and reading the newspaper. You see out of the corner of your eye a little girl sitting with her mom at the table nearby. You keep glancing over and you notice the little girl is staring you down. No matter what you do she continues to watch your every move. You wonder how long she has been sitting there and why she is gazing at you. You are being watched just like the people Michel Foucault describes, people who are simply being under constant surveillance. Foucault's work, "Panopticism," features a central control tower from which all inhabitants are watched while in their surrounding glass-walled cells. The Panopticon creates an atmosphere in which the inhabitants never know whether or not they are being watched forcing them to assume that they are at all times. With this mindset, "the exercise of power may be supervised by society as a whole" (Foucault). In other words, the people control their actions and take care of themselves appropriately just on the fact that they think they are being watched. "In appearance, [panopticism] is merely the solution of a technical problem; but, through it, a whole type of society emerges" (Foucault). The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton portrays a society that functions much like the Panopticon. Newland Archer and his fellow New Yorkers are part of a very close knit group of people. Everyone knows what everyone else's business and the gossip that surrounds them, which makes privacy a foreign concept. The only way to be accepted is to know the right people, have the right connections and, of course, have money. Once a part of the group, everyone must follow a set of unwritten rules. The society forces everyone to act a certain way, and ev...
3. Foucault argues in the conclusion that discipline is not just about control—it also produces new kinds of knowledge. He cites the rise of psychiatry and clinical medicine as examples. Apply Foucault’s ideas to your everyday life. How has discipline and surveillance produced who you are today and your ability to take action?
Rene Descartes decision to shatter the molds of traditional thinking is still talked about today. He is regarded as an influential abstract thinker; and some of his main ideas are still talked about by philosophers all over the world. While he wrote the "Meditations", he secluded himself from the outside world for a length of time, basically tore up his conventional thinking; and tried to come to some conclusion as to what was actually true and existing. In order to show that the sciences rest on firm foundations and that these foundations lay in the mind and not the senses, Descartes must begin by bringing into doubt all the beliefs that come to him by the senses. This is done in the first of six different steps that he named "Meditations" because of the state of mind he was in while he was contemplating all these different ideas. His six meditations are "One:Concerning those things that can be called into doubt", "Two:Concerning the Nature of the Human mind: that it is better known than the Body", "Three: Concerning God, that he exists", "Four: Concerning the True and the False", "Five: Concerning the Essence of Material things, and again concerning God, that he exists" and finally "Six: Concerning the Existence of Material things, and the real distinction between Mind and Body". Although all of these meditations are relevant and necessary to understand the complete work as a whole, the focus of this paper will be the first meditation.
“Justice must always question itself, just as society can exist only by means of the work it does on itself and on its institutions.” The philosopher Michel Foucault explains the delicate balance of the justice systems with society. We have grown accustom to our way of crime and punishment in the United States. It handles the situations in a way of treating everyone as equals. Hammurabi’s code relies on more of a crime fits the punishment method. The common code, an eye for an eye, shows how seriously strict Hammurabi’s code can be. Should punishment be handled like we do in today’s society, in a humane way, or a brute force method? Without a doubt, history shows that human nature causes us to desire power, and usually ends in criminal actions. Punishment comes from the government and how it is handled. Is the United States implementing their job or do we need to go back to a stricter code?
What is solitary Confinement? Solitary Confinement is the practice of isolating people in closed cells for 22-24 hours a day, virtually free of human contact, for periods of time ranging from days to decades. Solitary confinement results primarily from an individual’s behavior while incarcerated, not from their sentence. Although you are isolated and free of human contact Solitary Confinement can promote and worsen mental health issues. When being locked up in a cell for 23 hours everyday you do not get the exercise and activity that regular prisoners will get. Many of the prisoners subjected to isolation have serious mental illness and the conditions of solitary confinement can exacerbate their symptoms or provoke recurrence. Therefore Solitary
This essay will analyze and critique Michel Foucault’s (1984) essay The Use of Pleasure in order to reveal certain internal weaknesses it contains and propose modifications that would strengthen his reading of sexuality as a domain of moral self-formation. In order to do so, it will present a threefold critique of his work. Firstly, it will argue that that his focus on solely the metric of pleasure divorced from its political manifestations underemphasizes state power as a structuring principle of sexuality. Secondly, it will posit that his attention to classical morality privileges written works by male elites and fails to account for the subtexts that would demonstrate other forms of morality. Finally, it will argue that the nature of actors’ resistance to moral codes, explicated through Butler’s concept of iterability and signification, is an important factor that should also be considered. As a result of this critique, this essay
Michel Foucault’s essay, “Panopticism”, links to the idea of “policing yourself” or many call it panopticon. The panopticon is a prison which is shaped like a circle with a watchtower in the middle. The main purpose of the panopticon was to monitor a large group of prisoners with only few guards in the key spot. From that key spot, whatever the prisoners do they can be monitored, and they would be constantly watched from the key spot inside the tower. The arrangement of panopticon is done in excellent manner that the tower’s wide windows, which opened to the outside and kept every cell in 360-degree view. The cells were designed so it makes impossible for the prisoners to glances towards the center. In short, none of the prisoners were able to see into the tower. The arrangement of cells guaranteed that the prisoner would be under constant surveillance. This is the beauty of the panopticon that anyone can glance at the cells from the tower but no prisoners can see the tower. The prisoners may feel like someone is watching, and know the he or she is powerless to escape its watch, but the same time, the guard in the tower may not be looking at the prisoners. Just because the prisoners think that someone is watching them, they will behave properly.
Descartes had a desire to achieve true truth, in this it became apparent for him to set up a system that would allow him to achieve such an aspiration. One of Descartes most ambitious undertakings was to prove that there was a God and a soul; here his system was utilized. In following this system he would gradually come to conclusions that were not only true and increased his knowledge, but also were easily understood so others were able to follow his methods as well. These rules were, to never except anything that was not true as a truth, to take a problem and divide it into as many parts as possible, then from least difficult to most, slowly answer each problem in turn, and finally to review everything in this process; in following these
...ll true knowledge is solely knowledge of the self, its existence, and relation to reality. René Descartes' approach to the theory of knowledge plays a prominent role in shaping the agenda of early modern philosophy. It continues to affect (some would say "infect") the way problems in epistemology are conceived today. Students of philosophy (in his own day, and in the history since) have found the distinctive features of his epistemology to be at once attractive and troubling; features such as the emphasis on method, the role of epistemic foundations, the conception of the doubtful as contrasting with the warranted, the skeptical arguments of the First Meditation, and the cogito ergo sum--to mention just a few that we shall consider. Depending on context, Descartes thinks that different standards of warrant are appropriate. The context for which he is most famous, and on which the present treatment will focus, is that of investigating First Philosophy. The first-ness of First Philosophy is (as Descartes conceives it) one of epistemic priority, referring to the matters one must "first" confront if one is to succeed in acquiring systematic and expansive knowledge.