Michel Foucault

Wolin’s *The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s*

Reprising this worth-reading piece on the Maoism of Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault and other fellow-travelers: Alan Schrift’s critical discussion, in Philosophy in Review, of Richard Wolin’s The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s, which is now out in a second edition. Excerpt: “For young leftists—and this […]

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What Foucault liked to do with Arab boys — excerpt from Murray’s book

WHAT FOUCAULT LIKED TO DO TO ARAB BOYS. Excerpt from Douglas Murray’s The War on the West (2022): It is always unpleasant—as well as unwise—for thinkers to lambaste each other because of the habits of their personal lives. The personal is not always political and is certainly not always philosophical. Yet in March 2021, a

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Foucault versus the facts of reality

Excerpt from Professor Raymond Tallis’s review of Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Intellectual Impostures: Postmodern Philosophers’ Abuse of Science (London: Profile Books, 1998). Also translated as Fashionable Nonsense. “Eventually the postmodern Theorists started to attract the attention of experts in the disciplines into which they had strayed. Linguists looked at their linguistics and found it littered

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Woodhouse’s good article on Foucault

Leighton Woodhouse wrote this perceptive piece focused on Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Volume I. Woodhouse is right that sometimes Foucault offers only descriptive accounts of constitutive power relations. (Like in HS, though even in HS he does not consistently stick to that.) But that’s not the only Foucauldian text. Foucault also describes himself as a

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Derrida, according to Searle and Foucault

John Searle reports this conversation with Michel Foucault about deconstructionist Jacques Derrida:  ‘You can hardly misread him, because he’s so obscure. Every time you say, “He says so and so,” he always says, “You misunderstood me.” But if you try to figure out the correct interpretation, then that’s not so easy. I once said this

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Postmodernism’s Moral *Low* Ground [Open College transcript]

We’re posting serially at thinkspot the transcripts of my Open College podcasts. Here’s the thirteenth: OC13: Postmodernism’s Moral *Low* Ground. “Our classic rules are as follows: Approach discussion with a spirit of benevolence, give people the initial benefit of the doubt, make one’s goal the mutual advancement of understanding, hear out both or all sides

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Why Postmoderns Train—Not Educate—Activists

At the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, my article “Why Postmoderns Train—Not Educate—Activists.” Teasers: Who said this? We cannot escape our ethnocentric predicament. We must, in practice, privilege our own group. And this? You don’t want to build up your opponent’s arguments; you want to squelch them. This? Renounce all philosophical speculation and

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