59 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] |
23728 | Analysis aims to express the full set of platitudes surrounding a given concept [Smith,M] |
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] |
22353 | One view says objectivity is making a successful claim which captures the facts [Reiss/Sprenger] |
22356 | An absolute scientific picture of reality must not involve sense experience, which is perspectival [Reiss/Sprenger] |
22359 | Topic and application involve values, but can evidence and theory choice avoid them? [Reiss/Sprenger] |
22360 | The Value-Free Ideal in science avoids contextual values, but embraces epistemic values [Reiss/Sprenger] |
22362 | Value-free science needs impartial evaluation, theories asserting facts, and right motivation [Reiss/Sprenger] |
22364 | Thermometers depend on the substance used, and none of them are perfect [Reiss/Sprenger] |
21945 | Foucault originally felt that liberating reason had become an instrument of domination [Foucault, by Gutting] |
23744 | Defining a set of things by paradigms doesn't pin them down enough [Smith,M] |
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] |
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] |
22357 | The 'experimenter's regress' says success needs reliability, which is only tested by success [Reiss/Sprenger] |
22365 | The Bayesian approach is explicitly subjective about probabilities [Reiss/Sprenger] |
21941 | Unlike Marxists, Foucault explains thought internally, without deference to conscious ideas [Foucault, by Gutting] |
7422 | A subject is a form which can change, in (say) political or sexual situations [Foucault] |
22235 | Feelings are not unchanging, but have a history (especially if they are noble) [Foucault] |
23743 | Capturing all the common sense facts about rationality is almost impossible [Smith,M] |
23739 | Goals need desires, and so only desires can motivate us [Smith,M] |
23724 | A pure desire could be criticised if it were based on a false belief [Smith,M] |
23736 | A person can have a desire without feeling it [Smith,M] |
23723 | In the Humean account, desires are not true/false, or subject to any rational criticism [Smith,M] |
23735 | Subjects may be fallible about the desires which explain their actions [Smith,M] |
23738 | Humeans (unlike their opponents) say that desires and judgements can separate [Smith,M] |
23742 | If first- and second-order desires conflict, harmony does not require the second-order to win [Smith,M] |
23746 | Objective reasons to act might be the systematic desires of a fully rational person [Smith,M] |
23733 | Motivating reasons are psychological, while normative reasons are external [Smith,M] |
23740 | Humeans take maximising desire satisfaction as the normative reasons for actions [Smith,M] |
23745 | We cannot expect even fully rational people to converge on having the same desires for action [Smith,M] |
21939 | The author function of any text is a plurality of selves [Foucault, by Gutting] |
7419 | Ethics is the conscious practice of freedom [Foucault] |
23731 | 'Externalists' say moral judgements are not reasons, and maybe not even motives [Smith,M] |
23732 | A person could make a moral judgement without being in any way motivated by it [Smith,M] |
23729 | Moral internalism says a judgement of rightness is thereby motivating [Smith,M] |
23730 | 'Rationalism' says the rightness of an action is a reason to perform it [Smith,M] |
23727 | Expressivists count attitudes as 'moral' if they concern features of things, rather than their mere existence [Smith,M] |
23741 | Is valuing something a matter of believing or a matter of desiring? [Smith,M] |
7501 | Why couldn't a person's life become a work of art? [Foucault] |
7498 | Greeks and early Christians were much more concerned about food than about sex [Foucault] |
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] |
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] |