Foucault News

News and resources on French thinker Michel Foucault (1926-1984)

Gordon Hull, Signal or Noise? Foucault and Communication Theory (Part 1), New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science, 13 July 2023 Last time, I offered a quick synopsis of Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan’s excellent new book Code. Here, I’d like to track one specific Foucault reference in it. Geoghegan takes Lévi-Strauss’s Savage Mind as a central text …

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Eric Schliesser, Hume, Husserl and Foucault’s The Order of Things, Digressions & Impressions blog, 12 May 2023 As I have noted before (recall), Hume plays a triple role in Foucault’s (1966) Les mots et les choses (hereafter: The Order of Things).* First, alongside a number of other familiar philosophers Hume’s works are treated as illustrations …

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Originally posted on AGENT SWARM:
1) INTRODUCTION I am providing a translation of the incipit as reproduced at the end of a pre-publication review of Michel Foucault’s forthcoming book PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE. The review was published online by Philosophy Magazine and discusses the ideas expressed therein chiefly in structuralist-demarcationist terms, given that the book focuses on…

Some Reasons to be Skeptical of AI Authorship, Part 1: What is an (AI) Author? By Gordon Hull, New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science, 06 February 2023 Large Language Models (LLMs) like Chat-GPT burst into public consciousness sometime in the second half of last year, and Chat-GPT’s impressive results have led to a wave of …

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Eric Schliesser, Foucault on Enlightenment, and Journalism, Digressions and Impressions (blog), 19 January 2023. […] Foucault redefines the nature of journalism from, say, the reporting of news, to this more ontological or existential question pertaining in tricky ways to identity, ‘what are we now?’ To be sure, Foucault does not legislate that journalism is not …

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Gordon Hull, Foucault’s “Analytic Philosophy of Politics”, New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science, 02 July 2018 The current issue of Foucault Studies contains the first English translation of a lecture Foucault gave in Japan in 1978.  This “Analytic Philosophy of Politics” is essential reading if you have an interest in the transition between Foucault’s “power” and “ethics” work and/or …

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Josh Jones, Chez Foucault, the 1978 Fanzine That Introduced Students to the Radical French Philosopher, Open Culture Blog, 5 March 2015 Extract Into this fomenting intellectual culture stepped French theorist Michel Foucault, who first lectured in the U.S. in 1975 after the publication of his History of Sexuality. Foucault was a true product of the …

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Originally posted on Philosophical Naturalism:
“An experiment with a panoptic  system would suffice to find out;  different things could be taught to different children in different cells;  we could teach no matter what to no matter which child, and we would see the result. In this way we could raise children in completely different systems,…

Michael Bibby, Selections from Foucault’s Lectures on ‘Security, Territory, Population’ at the College de France (1977-78) “Michel Foucault’s art consisted in using history to cut diagonally through contemporary reality. He could speak of Nietzsche or Aristotle, of expert psychiatric opinion or the Christian pastoral, but those who attended his lectures always took from what he …

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Out of Unmündigkeit – Final Thoughts on Translating Kant on Enlightenment Extract from a post from James Schmidt’s blog Persistant Englightenment. Where Foucault Got it Right In opting for “exit” I allowed my reason to be guided by one particular discussion of Kant’s essay: that of Michel Foucault. In his Berkeley lecture on the question “What …

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