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Comment by camdenlock | Hacker News Reader

It... it really doesn't, and this article makes that fact quite plain. Foucault's philosophies are nuggets of well-worn common sense extrapolated out into billowing collections of unnecessary text.

I wonder if anyone has done the kind deed of whittling his most oft-cited gaseous emanations down to their core common sense origins. That'd save a lot of time for those of us not interested in a career in academia.

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The first page of "Discipline and Punish" is a very clear description of the drawing and quartering of a regicide. I am not sure what nuggets you are referring to. Citations, please. I think he is arguing against "whittling... down to their core common sense origins," because such origins are illusory.

Citations, please

This is a hilarious comment, given that Foucault's History of Sexuality contains almost no citations!

If you are interested in why Foucault ought to be a laughingstock, see Windshuttle's The Killing of History: https://www.amazon.com/Killing-History-Literary-Theorists-Mu... or the many essays Camille Paglia wrote on him. Her latest book has a reprint of "Review: Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf."

Power and knowledge are co-constitutive. Knowledge masks power relations between individuals and it always has a disciplinary function.

All discourses, including science, are rooted in their historical epoch. There are no transhistorical truths, but truth and justice are true relative to the field of power/knowledge they are embedded in.

Does that really sound like widely accepted common sense? Do you not agree that western societies are driven by a popular belief in either pure nationalist authority or in authority masked in terms of objectivity, scientific progress and justice?

> There are no transhistorical truths, but truth and justice are true relative to the field of power/knowledge they are embedded in.

Which is at least stated as if the quoted statement itself were a transhistorical truth. That is, the quoted statement, applied to itself, refutes itself. (Because if the statement itself is a transhistorical truth, then the statement itself is a counterexample to the claim of the statement. And if the statement itself is not a transhistorical truth, then there are transhistorical truths in other historical epochs and/or other fields of knowledge.)

My position as a materialist (and a practicing scientist) is that propositions are not magical transcendental objects. The idea of "refutation" rests on the presupposition of a given linguistic exchange being inside a self-consistent system of argument. In reality, language behaviors, including writing and argument, are always material, contingent and underspecified. Language is a "reef of dead metaphors". Utterances take place in a cultural and historical context, and their meaning, both at the level of reference and argument structure, is always dependent on that context, <i>including what I am writing right now</i>. You run into this kind of boring infinite recursion refrain when you remain attached to the idea that "proof" and "truth" operate at a metaphysical level above material. It's unfortunate that this is so widespread.

My position is that there is a reality which exists. Statements are more or less true to the degree that they conform or fail to conform to the reality of what exists. The words certainly are in a context and have meaning within that context. With well-chosen words, though, the statements can (but do not always) have a meaning that is larger than the particular context. (The meaning would have to be expressed in different words in other contexts, of course.)

Now, you could argue that we don't really know the truth of what exists, and therefore that my standard of "truth" is meaningless for all practical purposes. Nevertheless, this is what truth has been classically considered to be. (By "classically", I mean before Hegel.)

What does it mean to have a meaning that is "larger than" its context. What would that look like and what would its consequence be? If you just mean that every new statement also pushes the boundaries of or expands the discourse that it emerges from, then I agree, but that doesn't free it from its context. That new statement is still rooted in its episteme and any meaning it has is contingent.

What would be the criterion by which we could compare one system's correspondence to reality with another system? If there is no transcendental, supra-system way to compare, then where do you get the notion of "degrees" of conformation between reality and statements about reality?

Take the idea that tyranny among leaders leads to revolt among followers. Confucius said something like this, using Chinese words appropriate to the Chinese Spring and Autumn period. Locke said it, too, using English words appropriate to his time. And Foucault said it, in modern French. The truth of the statement rests on human nature, which hasn't changed that much since the time of Confucius. The words, however, have changed a lot, as have the cultures. So you say what is more universally true using the word-meanings that are current for your culture. But just because the word-meanings are only valid within your culture, that doesn't mean that you can't make statements whose truth transcends your culture.

Isn't that what most of philosophy is about?

But of course, well-worn common sense is, and always has been, in perilous short supply.

I always hate appeals to commmon sense. Common sense is often wrong. It gives us things like "the world is flat".

Bit of a strawman. Common sense is not folk wisdom. Also common sense doesn't really have a place in "cold" scientific knowledge.

Nevertheless, I feel compelled to point out that "the world is flat" was a perfectly good theory that fit the fact for most observers. What is foolish is the refusal to change one's belief once it was proved to be wrong, or even to be closed to the possibility of an alternative.

My freshman year of college I took a Polish literature seminar and I had to give a presentation on the Foucault and the body applied to a short story I hadn't read from The Street of Crocodiles.

An important thought crashed into my head that froze me solid for about 30 seconds, "who the F cares?"

I thanked the professor for her time, told her I was done with her class and I walked out. I dropped her class and switched my major to applied math. She sent me a very nice email that wished me luck.

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