This post was originally published on the Zero Books blog. It is the second of two posts; the first post in the series is here. To review quickly, Foucault charged Descartes with excluding madness from consideration in his Meditations on First Philosophy. The relevant passage from Foucault's Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique follows: In the economy Continue Reading …
Madness as Ontology: Catching Foucault’s Quote Mining
This is the first of a two-post series, the second can be found here. It's probable that one could not find a weaker defense attorney for the cogito, or for what's called the Cartesian subject, than Jacques Derrida. The author of Of Grammatology, Derrida is known as the founder of deconstruction, a mode of critical analysis or hermeneutics that problematizes and complicates Continue Reading …
Is Morality Ethical?
“Morality is neither rational nor absolute nor natural." (Nietzsche) Nietzsche and Spinoza both challenged the validity of morality based on transcendent or universal values. They both argued that moral restrictions are based on weakness: Nietzsche via enslavement by harboring vengeance or "resentment" against life ( Genealogy of Morals), Spinoza via enslavement to passive Continue Reading …
Foucault Was No Relativist
[Editor's Note: We're pleased to have some more blog input here from Getty, the guest from our Hume/Smith episode, who wrote his undergrad thesis on Foucault and was in line to be a guest on this one himself. You can blame me for the image, which I found here.] Was Foucault a relativist about truth? Truth-relativism is the doctrine that there are no absolute truths, only Continue Reading …