Foucault News

Paul Taborsky, The Logic of Cultures – Three structures of philosophical thought (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010).

Description
This book proposes to identify three long-term structures in causal reasoning – in particular, in terms of the relationship between cause and identity – that appear to be of value in categorizing and organizing various trends in philosophical thought. Such conceptual schemes involve a host of philosophical dilemmas (such as the problem of relativism), which are examined in the first chapter. A number of naturalistic and transcendental approaches to this problem are also analysed.

In particular, the book attempts to construct a theoretical basis for Foucault’s tripartite classification of epistemological structures in European thought. The final chapter attempts to buttress the above schema by extending the analysis from cause and identity to growth, change, and stability, critiquing certain ideas of Foucault and Heidegger, as well as examining the contemporary thought of process philosophy and complexity theory.

Contents: Plurality and Causality – What is a Paradigm? – Paradigms and Causal Structure – Universality and Mathesis Universalis – Temporality and Visibility – Classical and Modern Probability Theory – The Environment and Non-Monotonicity – The Marburg School and the Limit Concept; Foucault’s concept of ‘Man’ – Nineteenth Century Philosophy of Science – A Dynamic Model – Foucault and the Birth of the Clinic – Process, Growth and Complexity – Time and History.

James Miller, Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, January, 2011

James Miller is the author of one of the biographies of Foucault: The Passion of Michel Foucault

From Booklist
Miller combines short biographies and compact synopses of 12 philosophers’ ideas of wisdom. In a format suiting those intrigued by the history of philosophy but not yet prepared to take on the texts, Miller introduces Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Diogenes, Seneca, Augustine, Montaigne, Descartes, Rousseau, Kant, Emerson, and Nietzsche. Enlivened by Miller’s attention to how the subjects lives and actions measured up to their declamations, the presentations start with the thinkers’ adoption, in some cases from revelation, in others from reflection, of moral inquiry as a mode of the enlightened life. As well as the questions they strived to answer about truth and ideal conduct, Miller pointedly presents how their mental realms of abstraction, ever buffeted by demands of material or political realities, could agitate contemporaries or provoke posterity to bridle at inconsistencies between words and deeds, such as Rousseau’s notorious abandonment of his children. Conducting his audience safely through abstruse aspects of these philosophers’ precepts, Miller proves concise about their imitational symbolism to those of introspective bent. –Gilbert Taylor

A.C. Grayling notes in his review on Salon, January 25 2011

Miller presents his twelve mini-biographies as responses to Foucault’s remarks about “the problem of the philosophical life,” namely, the question of the relevance of philosophy to the questions of what one can know, and do, and hope for, given the conquests of science and the fragmented and competing voices of religions. But one need not take the essays as endeavours to see if philosophy still has a role in helping us identify the meanings of life. Each of them is a little gem in its own right as the portrait of an independently interesting individual and his thought. Miller is careful as well as eloquent, so we get penetrating vignettes of intensely interesting people who were moved in their several ways to contemplate the big questions, exploring themselves and others to achieve the kind of enlightenment that liberates, whatever form the truth appeared to them to take.