"The History of Truth": Foucault in Buffalo, 1972

The concept of parrhesia (free, true and courageous speech) is central to Michel Foucault’s last lecture courses. In this “late” period of his scientific career, the French philosopher started a thorough analysis of the ancient and early Christian sources with the aim to construct a detailed genealogy of the two phenomena that played a crucial role in the Western history — the genealogy of subjectivity and the genealogy of the “critical tradition” in philosophy. In order to analyze the latter, during the lecture course “The Government of Self and Others” (1982—1983), Foucault turned to the texts of Plato, which he considered foundational for the philosophical practices of veridiction in the West. The Platonic paradigm presents philosophy with a number of fundamental tasks, the main of which is the task of constantly testing the reality and seriousness — testing the words (logos) through the deeds and practices (ergon). Foucault postulates that in the modern philosophy this test invariably results in a certain attitude towards politics and power, which assumes rejection of the direct participation in political affairs, constant criticism of our mistakes and misconceptions, the search for and revelation of ways, in which we, as subjects, are able to change ourselves. In this article, the authors attempt to shed light on the genealogical significance of Foucault’s concept of parrhesia and its relationship to the modern philosophy; present the classification of parrhesia (on the basis of Foucault’s lectures) that allows to identify political and philosophical dimensions of this phenomenon and their different modalities, as well as review in a holistic way the Platonic philosophical parrhesia and consider the problem of its complex relationship with politics, which becomes especially acute when the “reality of philosophy” is being tested.

BOOK REVIEWS 685 antinomies and his doctrine of the highest good. Reason seeks an absolute whole, but while this cannot be found in the natural world, it is provided by the construct of a moral world of harmonious self-legislating agents. By building on the work of Schmucker and Henrich, Velkley can show that this idea of a moral end of all reason is not a late and desperate appendage to Kant's critical philosophy, but rather precedes and governs it. Theoretical philosophy becomes a "propadeutic" for turning back the "beclouding" of the morality of "common reason" by dogmatic or skeptical speculation. Unlike other moderns, Rousseau and Kant see this project as no mere moderate reform, but as aiming at a new "grounding of" the sacred and noble" (33) through philosophy, which brings us back from "self-inflicted alienation" (145) . Unlike Rousseau, Kant believes reason can provide its own pure source of motivation for this project through a demand for independence that is found in everyone and justifies an expectation for "large-scaJe emancipation." Here Velkley introduces some of his few critical remarks, observing that Kant overlooks some of Rousseau's perceptions about the difficulty of this project (54, 69), and that in general it is not clear why Kant (and, in a worse way, later idealists) presumed reason is thoroughly systematic and "philosophy must answer [or the totality of human welfare" (168). This book is surely essential reading for students of the period, although its broad scope can disappoint those looking for analytic treatments of Kant's major works. And Velkley may go too far in making his point about the primacy of practical reason. It is no surprise that the practical should have practical primacy, but that does not mean ethics can determine logic, or the "end of reason" can legitimate the doctrine of transcendental idealism which first makes permissible Kantian freedom and morality. I would have preferred more respect for the gravity of the theoretical issue of determinism , for the objection that Kant's late reliance on a "fact of reason" is a reversion to dogmatism, and for the possibility that throughout his work Kant remains close to rationalism. Velkley holds that even the Dissertation claims no "dogmatic theoretical cognition" (131), but this seems contradicted by its account of substantial interaction grounded in God. Finally, while the insights of Strauss, Tonelli, Kuebn, Yovel, etc., are well documented in a very helpful set of notes, Velkley might have also compared his account with some of the following: Kroner, Auxter, Schneewind, O'Neill, Foucauh, Deleuze. KARL AMERIKS University of Notre Dame Roger J. Sullivan. Immanuel Kant's Moral Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Pp. xvii + 413 . Cloth, $49.5o. Paper, $16.95. Professor Sullivan's book is both modest and ambitious. His declared objective is merely to provide a "comprehensive survey" of Kant's practical (or "moral") philosophy rather than a highly original contribution to the field of Kant scholarship. To the layman this may seem an unassuming project, demanding no more than basic exposi- 686 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 29:4 OCTOBER t991 tory competence. Yet as any Kant specialist will attest, and as Sullivan is fully aware, it is in fact a bold undertaking. Books on Kant's practical philosophy usually concentrate on one of its two component parts, ethics or the theory ofjustice, or on a single text, typically the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals or the Critique of Practical Reason. Sullivan's project is larger: to give a "synoptic" account of the entirety of Kant's practical philosophy. Keeping in mind the scope, complexity, and notorious obscurity of much of Kant's thinking on moral questions, this is a daunting task. Sullivan is to be commended for having on the whole handled it quite well. Anyone who reads Sullivan's book will profit in some way. With a few exceptions I will discuss in a moment, the general reader will find it an accurate guide to the most important issues in Kant's practical philosophy. There are two admirably succinct and lucid chapters on Kant's political philosophy (Chapters 16 and 17), which manage in a brief twenty-eight pages to...

Edmund Husserl's writings on moral philosophy have received relatively little attention in the scholarly literature. Nevertheless, those scholars who have written on Husserl's moral philosophy have distinguished between his early or "pre-war" ethics and his later or "postwar" ethics. Husserl's early ethics are influenced heavily by his teacher, Franz Brentano, while his later ethics are influenced by the practical writings of J. G. Fichte. As one might suspect given these two very different influences, there are issues concerning the consistency between Husserl's positions in his earlier and later ethics. Moreover, identifying Husserl's considered ethical position is complicated by the fact that, as Janet Donohoe points out, "it is important to recognize at the outset that Husserl's [ethical] theory is by no means complete. He was never satisfied enough with his account to publish it, nor is there even necessarily a unified theory that deserves the name of Husserl's ethics."1 Despite the difficulty Donohoe identifies, one may still speak of "Husserl's ethics," for he devoted many pages of lecture notes and research manuscripts to the articulation of his views on ethics. My focus in this essay is Husserl's later ethics. By drawing on Husserl's recently published lecture course from the early 1920s titled "Introduction to Ethics,"2 I shall expound and evaluate the influence Hume and Kant had on Husserl's moral philosophy. First, I shall argue that Husserl both uncritically endorses Hume's claim that all acts of valuing are based on feeling or sentiment, and I shall argue, as well, that Hume influenced Husserl's concern for preserving human individuality in an account of moral obligation. second, I shall argue that despite Husserl's criticism that Kant's moral philosophy cannot serve as a guide to action because it is too formal,3 Kant's conception of the moral law as universally and necessarily applying to all human beings, as well as Kant's notion of autonomy, deeply impressed Husserl. Third, I shall examine Husserl's account of what he calls the "absolute ought." Specifically, I shall examine and evaluate Husserl's attempts to explain and to justify how this absolute ought (i.e., moral obligation) is normative for all human beings by grounding it in each individual's personal values of love, values that originate from the inwardness of each individual. This attempt at justification was inspired by Fichte's practical philosophy and was motivated by Husserl's desire to reconcile universal moral obligation with human individuality. I think Husserl's Fichtean grounding of obligation fails, and I shall argue that by returning to Husserl's original Kantian inspiration, Husserlians can develop a cogent account of and normative justification for moral obligation. Humean and Kantian Influences in Husserl's "Introduction to Ethics" Husserl's lecture course, "Introduction to Ethics," gives us an interesting source of material for seeing the influences on Husserl's own thinking on ethics, for, unlike his early lecture notes,4 Husserl spends most of the course engaging the moral philosophies of other thinkers. Though Husserl spends time in the beginning of the lectures discussing the ethical theories of some ancient philosophers (most notably Aristippus' version of hedonism), most of his attention is directed to an examination of modern ethical theories from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. And, as in the early lecture notes, the central theme running throughout Husserl's lecture courses from the early twenties is the struggle in moral philosophy between an ethics of feeling and an ethics of reason. Husserl thinks that this struggle can be seen throughout the history of Western ethics, but he believes that it comes to a head in the debates between moral sense theories and rationalist theories of ethics from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.5 More ximportantly, Husserl sees the struggle as it is articulated from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries as continuing into Husserl's time. …

Heidegger often said that Auseinandersetzung, debate, is essence of thinking, and accordingly fitting way to appropriate his own thinking.' This has certainly come true in case of longstanding debate over importance of Heidegger's youthful writings before his 1927 and Time, a debate which is perhaps analogous to debate about significance or Hegel's theological writings,2 or about relation of early Socratic Dialogues to Plato's middle and late Dialogues. According to Hannah Arendt, Heidegger's youthful writings gained a legendary status already in early twenties.3 They were continually praised thereafter in publications of students such as Arendt, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Oskar Becker, Karl Lowith, and Leo Strauss.4 Student transcripts of Heidegger's early lecture courses have circulated for decades in a kind of philosophical underground spanning continents. But it is only in last decade that these courses and other writings have begun to be published5 and now translated into English.6 The debate over importance of these writings was at first restricted to private circles when repeated requests by Heidegger's students for publication of some of legendary early texts fell on deaf ears of master. It was not until 1973 that he finally published one of them, namely, his 1920 review of Karl Jaspers's Psychologie der Weltanschauungen.7 The debate became public appearance in late fifties of Heidegger's 1953-54 A Dialogue on Language. Here Heidegger discouraged his interlocutor's dogged interest in his 1920 lecture course, Phanomenologie der Anschauung und des Ausdrucks (Theorie der philosophischen Begriffsbildung), expressing impatience continual hunt after muddy of student transcripts of his youthful courses, and preferring to direct conversation to themes of his later thought. Heidegger's unfavorable judgment of his youthful writings was summed up in statement that with such youthful leaps one easily becomes unjust.8 Thus he did not make plans for his early Freiburg lectures between 1919 and 1923 to be included in his Collected Edition, which began to be published in 1975.9 For him, these lecture course manuscripts were at most simply inferior anticipations of his 1927 and Time. However, Oskar Becker, who began attending Heidegger's courses in 1919, preferred to look at things in reverse, maintaining that Being and Time is no longer original Heidegger, but rather repeats his original breakthrough only in a scholastically hardened form.10 The debate entered a new phase in sixties when Otto Poggeler published his monumental study of Heidegger, Der Denkweg Martin Heideggers, which was based to a great extent on manuscripts of unpublished youthful lecture courses, and argued that Heidegger's critique of western metaphysics and his new historical manner of asking the question of being was originally initiated by influence of Christian sources and especially Martin Luther. The claim was dismissed among some Heidegger circles in Germany as a fabrication.11 It was Heidegger himself who had made unpublished lecture course manuscripts available to Poggeler, but, according to Poggeler, in conversations Heidegger only tolerated my treating his early courses like Hegel's youthful writings (thus even dreaming of a future discovery of finest thing he had worked out).12 The debate was carried forward into seventies and eighties a series of essays by American scholar Thomas Sheehan, who ignored Heidegger's dismissal of his youthful writings, and accordingly reported contents of many of these unpublished writings. But debate has recently reached a higher pitch long-awaited publication of these writings, in wake of which some have maintained Heidegger's old opinion of them,'3 while first two systematic studies of Heidegger's youthful period in any language, namely, my The Young Heidegger: Rumor of Hidden King (1994) and Theodore Kisiel's The Genesis of Heidegger's and Time (1993), have recently argued adamantly against it,'4 as have John Caputo, David Krell, and a number of other scholars appearing in a recent anthology devoted to Heidegger's youthful period: Reading Heidegger From Start: Essays in His Earliest Thought (1994). …

The roots of Kurt Gödel's functional interpretation in the Dialectica paper of 1958 go back to a lecture course from 1941 and a single lecture given at Yale in April 1941. Although the functional interpretation is first mentioned in 1938 in the context of the extended Hilbert Programme, the 1941 lectures mostly discuss the functional interpretation in the context of intuitionistic logic. In this article, I will examine the early development of the functional interpretation and its relationship to the 1938 ‘Zilsel’ lecture, especially the critical remarks on Gentzen's consistency proof. It is shown that Gödel's functional interpretation was decidedly influenced by Gentzen, putting into question his earlier criticism of Gentzen's proof.

Reviewed by: An Enlightenment Tory in Victorian Scotland: The Career of Sir Archibald Alison Gordon Bigelow (bio) Tristram Kennedy and the Revival of Irish Legal Training, 1835–1885, by Colum Kenny; pp. xviii + 270. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1999, £30.00, $45.00. Modernity is a colonial artifact. This is perhaps the central insight of postcolonial criticism for scholarship in nineteenth-century Europe, and it is borne out by the obscure histories brought to light in Colum Kenny’s book on legal education in Victorian Ireland. The standardization of the professions has been a common theme of nineteenth-century cultural history, but it is only recently that we have begun to see liberal institutions like these as products of colonial culture, imported only latterly back into metropolitan use. One useful example of this phenomenon of reverse migration is the brief establishment of a law school in Dublin between 1839 and 1842, a school which, though short-lived, would set standards for the training of lawyers that would be gradually adopted throughout England and Ireland over the course of the next fifty years. Colum Kenny’s book presents this story and the life of its protagonist, Tristram Kennedy, attorney, land agent, off-and-on MP, and founder of the Dublin Law Institute in 1839. British legal training up to this point was carried out by apprenticeship, a system that privileged birth and family connection over ability. Beyond this period of unregulated study, students were only required to “keep” a certain number of terms at one of the inns of court in London. Though seemingly intended to familiarize students with court practice, the requirement was monitored only by the students’ attendance at a fixed number of dinners at the inns for each term. Daniel O’Connell once remarked that under this rule legal training was made a matter of “so many legs of mutton” (x). Dublin had its own Law Society at the King’s Inns, formed in 1541, just a generation after the practice of the Brehons, the legal counselors of Gaelic Ireland, was outlawed by London. But Irish students were forced by the Statute of Jeofailles, passed the following year, to keep terms at one of the London inns before returning to be called to the Irish bar. University graduates could keep a reduced number of terms, but this gave advantage only to the Anglo-Irish elite at Trinity College. Meanwhile, Kenny writes, “training in the common law had been utterly neglected by the universities and the inns of court” (148). In 1838, a Parliamentary commission headed by Irish member Thomas Wyse delivered a report on Irish education. This classic liberal document provided the argument for broadened access to the professions in Ireland, England’s nearest colony until its nominal incorporation into Great Britain with the 1800 Act of Union: “[An] appropriate system of education for the middle class is the [End Page 347] only means by which they may be enabled to acquire and maintain that proper position in society to which they are entitled, and by the maintenance of which the community can be fully protected from the chances of internal disorder” (81). Kennedy founded the Dublin Law Institute the next year, in 1839, setting up formal courses of lectures and providing for the first time an opportunity to train in the law without the patronage of an established practitioner. “Protestant, dissenter, roman catholics [sic], whig, tory, conservative and radical” (87), he argued, should be united in the goal of standardized legal training, given that such a common rule, and the merit-based system it aimed at, would reduce “the chances of internal disorder.” Kennedy’s Institute fell when a Tory government returned to power and canceled its meager support, but its liberal vision would set the program for gradual reforms through the rest of the century. The Statute of Jeofailles, requiring Irish students to attend the English inns, was repealed in 1885, by which time courses and examinations in law were becoming the norm in Irish and English universities. The paradox of these reforms, however, is the great paradox of liberal ideology itself. Conceived as a means to unite all parties, to find the common core of...

It is often remarked that Heidegger’s Being and Time was originally proposed as a book on Aristotle, and that formative work for this initial expression of Heidegger’s existential ontology was developed through the early 1920s in a series of lecture courses and seminars on Aristotle’s practical philosophy. This paper examines select details from Heidegger’s 1924 summer course in order to question the presuppositions of Heidegger’s decision to found the project of fundamental ontology on a purely philological reading of Aristotle. At stake is the method of investigation which permitted Heidegger to think politics through ontology in his most controversial writings from the 1930s—and ultimately the meaning of philosophy itself.

The most important texts on ethics from Edmund Husserl (1864–1938) are two large volumes based on his lecture courses on ethics – one on the courses he presented in 1908/09, 1911, and 1914 (1988), and one on the courses of 1920 and 1924 (2004) – along with several programmatic essays on individual and social ethics, which were originally composed for the Japanese journal Kaizo in the early 1920s (1989). These texts, which remained unpublished until five decades after Husserl's death, confirm the general view expressed in his published works that transcendental phenomenology as he developed it, as a general method for philosophy and philosophical issues, was also the key to reasonable and rigorous philosophical discussions in practical philosophy.

The chapter provides a detailed reading of the genesis of the ruse of techne in the early Heidegger, through the conflation of causal and instrumental ends. The key is Heidegger’s early engagement with Aristotle’s practical philosophy, especially the conception of phronesis in the Nicomachean Ethics. Vardoulakis shows how Heidegger’s works from this period, such as the lectures course Plato’s Sophist, provide the basis for this conception of action, namely, the ethical and political importance of an action without ends and effects, or the ineffectual. Following Heidegger, such a conception of action has been assumed without questioning it in the continental philosophical tradition.

Aristotle (384–322 BC) published dialogues, but they have all been long lost, except for small fragments. What survives of his writings are treatises, based on lecture courses that he gave at his school in Athens called the “Lyceum.” Lectures are of course orations, exercises in rhetoric, and Aristotle’s treatises constitute a magnificent new version of the art of civically responsible philosophic teaching that we have seen displayed and taught by Plato and his Socrates. We have learned from Plato that the first principle of such rhetoric is the realization that the philosopher’s radically skeptical moral questioning is dangerous for lawful society. Aristotle himself stresses that “law has no strength, as regards being obeyed, except habit; and this does not come into being except through length of time” ( Politics 1269a20–21; consider the context). Philosophic questioning essentially challenges the moral habituation that is the sole strong basis of lawful society. Responsible public expression of philosophic questioning must therefore be cautiously muted and muffled. Accordingly, Aristotle begins his Politics in a tone that is anything but skeptical. He starts out making a number of very big claims on behalf of the nobility and the supremacy in rank of politics, as lived in the self-governing, republican city – the polis . He asserts that that city is a “community” ( koinonia ) whose aim is the most authoritative good, encompassing all other goods of all other communities. (He gives no indication, at the start of the Politics , that the philosophic life and friendship might transcend the city – as he suggests near the end of his Nicomachean Ethics .) No one before or after Aristotle has ever commenced a book by making such enormous claims for the scope and supremacy of politics.

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

This chapter analyzes the political function of death in Michel Foucault’s elaboration of biopower. It begins by unpacking the biopolitics of death in Foucault’s 1975–6 lecture course at the College de France, Society Must Be Defended, and the biopolitics of life in his groundbreaking book, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1. In the lectures Foucault emphasizes the role of race and racism in biopolitics; in the The History of Sexuality, published after the lecture course, Foucault mentions race only tangentially, instead declaring sexuality the central mechanism through which biopower operates. The chapter jumps forward chronologically to Foucault’s 1981–2 College de France course, The Hermeneutics of the Self, to examine his lectures on ancient philosophical practices of self-care and death preparation. Finally, it concludes with an analysis of a relatively glib short essay on suicide, “The Simplest of Pleasures”, that Foucault wrote for a queer Parisian periodical, Le Gay Pied.

This chapter examines Michel Foucault's approach to the history of systems of thought, which relied upon a distinctive concept of discourse he defined in terms of rules governing the production of statements in a given empirical field at a given time. The study of these rules formed the basis of Foucault's archaeology of knowledge. The chapter first considers Foucault's conception of philosophy as the critique of the present before explaining how his criticism combined archaeological and genealogical methods of writing history and operated along three distinct methodological axes corresponding to knowledge, power, and ethics. It then describes Foucault's archaeological approach to the study of systems of thought or discourse, along with his historical approach to truth. It also discusses Foucault's theory of freedom, his views on the nature and tasks of government, and his ideas about subjectivity in relation to care for the self.

The article considers in historiographical context the main problems, topics and subjects of the unpublished lecture course “The History of the Peoples of the USSR”, delivered by Academician Yu.V. Gautier at the Moscow State Historical and Archival Institute (MGIAI) in the academic year 1936/37. In the lecture course are seen those priorities and benchmarks which are due to the specifics of the historiographical process of those years, but at the same time are evident many fundamental principles and foundations of understanding of the Russian historical process, typical for historians of the “old school”, forced to adapt their lives to the circumstances of the new historiographical life.

Situation awareness (SA) has become a ubiquitous object of knowledge in our discourses of human performance and accident explanation. Based on Michel Foucault's archaeological approach, in this paper, we examine SA by mapping the ‘conditions of possibility’ for this object to emerge. By highlighting the logic that SA builds upon, the political need that it intends to address, and the knowledges that delimitate it in its constitution, we aim to display the contingent nature of this object. Ultimately, we argue that as a discursive object, SA has effects.