56 ideas
| 7500 | Early Greeks cared about city and companions; later Greeks concentrated on the self [Foucault] |
| 20455 | Philosophy really got started as the rival mode of discourse to tragedy [Critchley] |
| 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] |
| 20446 | Philosophy begins in disappointment, notably in religion and politics [Critchley] |
| 6848 | Humour is practically enacted philosophy [Critchley] |
| 6847 | Humour can give a phenomenological account of existence, and point to change [Critchley] |
| 7068 | If infatuation with science leads to bad scientism, its rejection leads to obscurantism [Critchley] |
| 6844 | Scientism is the view that everything can be explained causally through scientific method [Critchley] |
| 20449 | Science gives us an excessively theoretical view of life [Critchley] |
| 7423 | Philosophy and politics are fundamentally linked [Foucault] |
| 7075 | To meet the division in our life, try the Subject, Nature, Spirit, Will, Power, Praxis, Unconscious, or Being [Critchley] |
| 7069 | The French keep returning, to Hegel or Nietzsche or Marx [Critchley] |
| 6835 | German idealism aimed to find a unifying principle for Kant's various dualisms [Critchley] |
| 6837 | Since Hegel, continental philosophy has been linked with social and historical enquiry. [Critchley] |
| 6836 | Continental philosophy fights the threatened nihilism in the critique of reason [Critchley] |
| 6838 | Continental philosophy is based on critique, praxis and emancipation [Critchley] |
| 6845 | Continental philosophy has a bad tendency to offer 'one big thing' to explain everything [Critchley] |
| 6846 | Phenomenology is a technique of redescription which clarifies our social world [Critchley] |
| 20448 | Phenomenology uncovers and redescribes the pre-theoretical layer of life [Critchley] |
| 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] |
| 22520 | You can't reason someone out of an irrational opinion [Swift] |
| 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] |
| 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] |
| 20454 | Wallace Stevens is the greatest philosophical poet of the twentieth century in English [Critchley] |
| 21939 | The author function of any text is a plurality of selves [Foucault, by Gutting] |
| 20456 | Interesting art is always organised around ethical demands [Critchley] |
| 7419 | Ethics is the conscious practice of freedom [Foucault] |
| 20447 | The problems is not justifying ethics, but motivating it. Why should a self seek its good? [Critchley] |
| 7067 | Food first, then ethics [Critchley] |
| 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] |
| 6843 | Perceiving meaninglessness is an achievement, which can transform daily life [Critchley] |
| 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] |
| 20450 | The state, law, bureaucracy and capital are limitations on life, so I prefer federalist anarchism [Critchley] |
| 20452 | Anarchism used to be libertarian (especially for sexuality), but now concerns responsibility [Critchley] |
| 20451 | Belief that humans are wicked leads to authoritarian politics [Critchley] |
| 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] |