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Episode 200: Kant/Mendelssohn/Foucault on Enlightenment (Part Two)

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Continuing on “What Is Enlightenment” by Immanuel Kant (1784), “On Enlightening the Mind” by Moses Mendelssohn (1784), and “What Is Enlightenment” by Michael Foucault (1984).

We finish up Kant (the courage to know!) and lay out the Mendelssohn (cultivation vs. enlightenment) and Foucault (ironically heroize the present!). Will this conversation enlighten you? Who knows?

Listen to part one first or get the unbroken, ad-free Citizen Edition. Please support PEL!

End song: “Holy Fool” by Love and Rockets. Listen to singer Daniel Ash on Nakedly Examined Music #35.

Episode 200: Kant/Mendelssohn/Foucault on Enlightenment (Part One)

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On “What Is Enlightenment” by Immanuel Kant (1784), “On Enlightening the Mind” by Moses Mendelssohn (1784), and “What Is Enlightenment” by Michael Foucault (1984).

At the end of the historical period known as The Enlightenment, a Berlin newspaper asked what exactly that is, and Kant and Mendelssohn responded. Both were concerned with whether too much enlightenment among the public can cause social unrest, and so whether there should be freedom of speech and opinion. Foucault thinks that we’re not yet Enlightened, that it’s an ongoing process of critique.

Continue on part 2, or get the unbroken, ad-free Citizen Edition now. Please support PEL!

Episode 200: Kant/Mendelssohn/Foucault on Enlightenment (Citizen Edition)

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On “What Is Enlightenment” by Immanuel Kant (1784), “On Enlightening the Mind” by Moses Mendelssohn (1784), and “What Is Enlightenment” by Michael Foucault (1984).

At the end of the historical period known as the Enlightenment, a Berlin newspaper asked what exactly that is, and Kant and Mendelssohn responded. Both were concerned with whether too much enlightenment among the public can cause social unrest, and so whether there should be freedom of speech and opinion. Foucault thinks that we’re not yet Enlightened, that it’s an ongoing process of critique.

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End song: “Holy Fool” by Love and Rockets. Listen to singer Daniel Ash on Nakedly Examined Music #35.

Episode 189: Authorial Intent (Barthes, Foucault, Beardsley, et al) (Part Two)

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Continuing on “The Death of the Author” by Roland Barthes (1967) and “What Is an Author?” by Michel Foucault (1969), and finally getting to “Against Theory” by Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels (1982).

What could it mean to say that a text, once written, speaks itself? We get into Foucault’s critique of the cult of the author and the reader-centric types of analysis he proposes in its place. Plus, Knapp and Michaels’s poem written by natural forces on a rock. Crazy stuff!

Hear part 1, or get the Citizen Edition and supporters’ part 3.

End song: “The Auteur” by David J (2018). Listen to Mark’s interview with him in Nakedly Examined Music #73.

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Episode 189: Authorial Intent (Barthes, Foucault, Beardsley, et al) (Part One)

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On four essays about how to interpret artworks: “The Intentional Fallacy” by W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley (1946), “The Death of the Author” by Roland Barthes (1967), “What Is an Author?” by Michel Foucault (1969), and “Against Theory” by Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels (1982). When you’re trying to figure out what, say, a poem means, isn’t the best way to do that to just ask the author? Most of these guys say no, and that’s supposed to reveal something about the nature of meaning.

This continues on part two, or support us for access to the ad-free, unbroken Citizen Edition plus a one-hour follow-up discussion.

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Episode 189: Authorial Intent (Barthes, Foucault, Beardsley, et al) (Citizen Edition)

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On four essays about how to interpret artworks: “The Intentional Fallacy” by W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley (1946), “The Death of the Author” by Roland Barthes (1967), “What Is an Author?” by Michel Foucault (1969), and “Against Theory” by Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels (1982). When you’re trying to figure out what, say, a poem means, isn’t the best way to do that to just ask the author? Most of these guys say no, and that’s supposed to reveal something about the nature of meaning.

End song: “The Auteur” by David J (2018). Listen to Mark’s interview with him in Nakedly Examined Music #73.

Also check out the follow-up discussion.

Descartes’s Horror?

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Examining Descartes’s Cogito, one can find that rather than philosophy and reason being a shield from horror and madness, the truth might be the opposite.

A Wealth of Not School Offerings in June

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Summer has arrived, and in case you can’t decide whether to take Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason or Franz Kafka’s The Trial to the beach with you, let me help: take them both and be prepared for Not School in June.  Thinking of taking summer classes?  Think better of it.  That’s expensive, and for a measly $5 a month you can Continue Reading …

Michel Foucault and the Birth of Modern Medicine

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[This is a post from Kevin Jobe, friend of Law Ware and the podcast.  It is part of a longer paper which PEL Citizens can download here.] i] Introduction. “This book is about space, about language, and about death; it is about the act of seeing, the gaze.” (ix) So begins The Birth of the Clinic: an Archaeology of Medical Perception Continue Reading …

Žižek on Foucault, Descartes and Madness

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OK, so this isn’t the easiest thing to read (after seeing numerous Žižek videos, it looks to me that he writes like he talks like he thinks, which is pretty fluid, making connections between things and not necessarily driving through focused theses…) but a little time spent on it yields some interesting points.  For some context, Katie noted in the Continue Reading …

Historyish Podcast Profile of Foucault

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In looking for Foucault supplementary audio, I ran across a fairly new podcast, “Historyish,” which appears to be run by people involved with the University of Warwick and the Postgraduate Forum for the History of Medicine. Their October 2011 episode on Foucault can be found here; the page itself includes some of the biographical information read on the episode. The Continue Reading …

Foucault on Freedom and Domination

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We opened the discussion in the Foucault podcast with the question, “are we really free?”  I’d just like to take a minute to clarify this question and to raise some problems for Foucault. First of all, there’s certainly a sense in which Foucault never denied that we’re free.  He even says that “freedom is the ontological condition of power,” meaning that power Continue Reading …

What to Do About Behaving Badly

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This is an obvious cross-reference for this group—indeed, many of you likely already read it. Peter Singer and Agata Sagan have an column in NYTimes’ “The Stone” today called “Are We Ready for a Morality Pill?” They present the conundrum of the how to factor in our growing understanding of the effect of brain chemistry not just on our mood and Continue Reading …

Rick Roderick on Foucault

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Long time listeners and readers know that I’m a fan of Rick Roderick.  For those who don’t know, he was from Texas, got his degree in philosophy from UT and taught at various places including Duke.  He was a down home type who became famous to philosophiles through a couple of lecture series he published through The Teaching Company.  (Home Continue Reading …

History of the Prison

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Check out this video.  It is a brief history of prisons, but also focuses on the use of technology in and the architecture of prisons.  It makes the indirect but clear point that surveiller goes hand in hand with technology.  There’s a nice spot right at the beginning where the Commissioner of the NYC Dept. of Corrections talks about how Continue Reading …

Foucault on Discipline and Punish

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Here’s a video of Foucault talking about Discipline & Punish.(Well, an audio track with images)  He explains his motivation for writing the book and the central question he sees posed by the development of the penal system in France.  In short, there was a rapid growth of prisons in France.  The prisons still functioned as institutions of punishment and an Continue Reading …

Foucault and Heidegger

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So there was a longish (8 minutes) bit that I cut from the episode where I asked Katie whether Foucault’s notions of Power and Knowledge correlated in some way with Heidegger’s notions of Being and Truth.  I was incoherent and Katie understandably treated the question as the nonsense that it was.  She has since addressed the Heidegger/Foucault connection in the Continue Reading …

Foucault and Deleuze on Drugs

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I just want to clarify something I said during the course of the Foucault episode: that Foucault and Deleuze did a lot of drugs together. This could be false. This is one of those rumors you pick up gradually when you take a few classes in contemporary continental philosophy.  You hear a lot of anecdotes of the dubious kind that always Continue Reading …

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The Partially Examined Life is a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living but then thought better of it. Each episode, we pick a text and chat about it with some balance between insight and flippancy. You don’t have to know any philosophy, or even to have read the text we’re talking about to (mostly) follow and (hopefully) enjoy the discussion

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