55 ideas
| 7500 | Early Greeks cared about city and companions; later Greeks concentrated on the self [Foucault] |
| 15045 | The big issue since the eighteenth century has been: what is Reason? Its effect, limits and dangers? [Foucault] |
| 7426 | Critical philosophy is what questions domination at every level [Foucault] |
| 7423 | Philosophy and politics are fundamentally linked [Foucault] |
| 15038 | Structuralism systematically abstracted the event from sciences, and even from history [Foucault] |
| 7420 | When logos controls our desires, we have actually become the logos [Foucault] |
| 21945 | Foucault originally felt that liberating reason had become an instrument of domination [Foucault, by Gutting] |
| 15044 | 'Truth' is the procedures for controlling which statements are acceptable [Foucault] |
| 15042 | Truth doesn't arise from solitary freedom, but from societies with constraints [Foucault] |
| 13007 | Archimedes defined a straight line as the shortest distance between two points [Archimedes, by Leibniz] |
| 9240 | Love creates a necessity concerning what to care about [Frankfurt] |
| 15037 | Why does knowledge appear in sudden bursts, and not in a smooth continuous development? [Foucault] |
| 21942 | Foucault challenges knowledge in psychology and sociology, not in the basic sciences [Foucault, by Gutting] |
| 7424 | Saying games of truth were merely power relations would be a horrible exaggeration [Foucault] |
| 21941 | Unlike Marxists, Foucault explains thought internally, without deference to conscious ideas [Foucault, by Gutting] |
| 9264 | Persons are distinguished by a capacity for second-order desires [Frankfurt] |
| 9266 | A person essentially has second-order volitions, and not just second-order desires [Frankfurt] |
| 7422 | A subject is a form which can change, in (say) political or sexual situations [Foucault] |
| 9267 | Free will is the capacity to choose what sort of will you have [Frankfurt] |
| 22235 | Feelings are not unchanging, but have a history (especially if they are noble) [Foucault] |
| 9265 | The will is the effective desire which actually leads to an action [Frankfurt] |
| 20015 | Freedom of action needs the agent to identify with their reason for acting [Frankfurt, by Wilson/Schpall] |
| 21939 | The author function of any text is a plurality of selves [Foucault, by Gutting] |
| 7419 | Ethics is the conscious practice of freedom [Foucault] |
| 9228 | Ranking order of desires reveals nothing, because none of them may be considered important [Frankfurt] |
| 9270 | A 'wanton' is not a person, because they lack second-order volitions [Frankfurt] |
| 9269 | A person may be morally responsible without free will [Frankfurt] |
| 9238 | Morality isn't based on reason; moral indignation is quite unlike disapproval of irrationality [Frankfurt] |
| 9232 | It is by caring about things that we infuse the world with importance [Frankfurt] |
| 9234 | If you don't care about at least one thing, you can't find reasons to care about anything [Frankfurt] |
| 9229 | What is worthwhile for its own sake alone may be worth very little [Frankfurt] |
| 9233 | Our criteria for evaluating how to live offer an answer to the problem [Frankfurt] |
| 9235 | Rather than loving things because we value them, I think we value things because we love them [Frankfurt] |
| 9236 | Love can be cool, and it may not involve liking its object [Frankfurt] |
| 9237 | The paradigm case of pure love is not romantic, but that between parents and infants [Frankfurt] |
| 9239 | I value my children for their sake, but I also value my love for them for its own sake [Frankfurt] |
| 7501 | Why couldn't a person's life become a work of art? [Foucault] |
| 9227 | We might not choose a very moral life, if the character or constitution was deficient [Frankfurt] |
| 9230 | People want to fulfill their desires, but also for their desires to be sustained [Frankfurt] |
| 7498 | Greeks and early Christians were much more concerned about food than about sex [Foucault] |
| 9241 | Loving oneself is not a failing, but is essential to a successful life [Frankfurt] |
| 9300 | Boredom is serious, not just uncomfortable; it threatens our psychic survival [Frankfurt] |
| 21940 | Nature is not the basis of rights, but the willingness to risk death in asserting them [Foucault] |
| 15043 | Every society has a politics of truth, concerning its values, functions, prestige and mechanisms [Foucault] |
| 15040 | Marxists denounced power as class domination, but never analysed its mechanics [Foucault] |
| 15041 | Power doesn't just repress, but entices us with pleasure, artefacts, knowledge and discourse [Foucault] |
| 8991 | Foucault can't accept that power is sometimes decent and benign [Foucault, by Scruton] |
| 7425 | The aim is not to eliminate power relations, but to reduce domination [Foucault] |
| 22236 | The big question of the Renaissance was how to govern everything, from the state to children [Foucault] |
| 21947 | Power is localised, so we either have totalitarian centralisation, or local politics [Foucault, by Gutting] |
| 21946 | Prisons gradually became our models for schools, hospitals and factories [Foucault, by Gutting] |
| 7418 | The idea of liberation suggests there is a human nature which has been repressed [Foucault] |
| 9231 | Freedom needs autonomy (rather than causal independence) - embracing our own desires and choices [Frankfurt] |
| 21116 | Power is used to create identities and ways of life for other people [Foucault, by Shorten] |
| 15039 | History lacks 'meaning', but it can be analysed in terms of its struggles [Foucault] |