How some political ideologies depend on the self-induced selflessness of their members. Here is Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism speaking of both Nazism and Communism: “How little the masses were driven by the famous instinct for self-preservation … . The fanaticism of members of totalitarian movements, so clearly different in quality from the greatest […]
Is everyone selfish? Hannah Arendt quotation Read More »
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
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
What Foucault liked to do with Arab boys — excerpt from Murray’s book Read More »
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
Foucault versus the facts of reality Read More »
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
Woodhouse’s good article on Foucault Read More »
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
Derrida, according to Searle and Foucault Read More »
One datum. Here is Michel Foucault explaining why the proletariat engage in class warfare: “The proletariat doesn’t wage war against the ruling class because it considers such a war to be just. The proletariat makes war with the ruling class because … it wants to take power.” The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature That’s from
Foucault and whether postmodernism is neo-Marxist Read More »
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
Postmodernism’s Moral *Low* Ground [Open College transcript] Read More »