Thank you for a very good overview. At the end of his career, Foucault returned to the legacy of the Enlightenment after having spent his life criticizing rationality, which surprised Habermas. Foucault finally understood the aporia to which his philosophy led. This significant trajectory would deserve a video, I think.

@lloydgush

10 ай бұрын

After a few too many kids...

@94josema

10 ай бұрын

Could you please elaborate on that? Where did Foucualt returned to Enlightenment? Any specific text that I can read?

@hedi9221

10 ай бұрын

@@94josema A few weeks after Michel Foucault's death, in 1984, Le Magazine littéraire published an unpublished text entitled "Qu'est-ce que les Lumières?" (What is Enlightenment?), in which the philosopher referred to Kant and "sapere aude", the motto of intellectual emancipation through the search for truth. A few months later, another text under the same title appeared in English. Longer and more argumentative, it offered a precise analysis of the "Was ist Aufklärung?" published two centuries earlier, in which Foucault recognized the origin of philosophical modernity. For Foucault's opponents, the 1984 texts came as a huge surprise, as they appeared to be a posthumous provocation. Foucault had often been presented as a resolute critic of the rationalist tradition born of the Enlightenment. After undermining the human sciences in "Les Mots et les Choses", he had proposed, in "Surveiller et Punir", a new theory of power that rendered obsolete the democratic pretensions of modern, liberal societies born of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. The two pillars of Enlightenment modernity, in the order of knowledge (the human sciences) and in the order of power (liberal reformism), were thus attacked at their very foundation. The publication of the text on the Enlightenment therefore came as a surprise. Had Foucault been misread and misunderstood? Or had he transformed himself, in the last years of his life, into the heir to an intellectual tradition he had hitherto opposed? Jürgen Habermas, who had vigorously criticized Foucault as a resolute opponent of modernity, was stunned when he discovered his commentary on Kant. He did not know whether to rejoice at such a rallying to the cause of the Enlightenment, or to express his incomprehension at what appeared to him to be a strange about-turn, incompatible with all of Foucault's earlier work.

I think there are universals, but I don't think this coherence example is especially strong since all naturally occurring languages have endless rows of exceptions to their rules of grammar. More importantly, why would the existence of humans universals, constitute evidence for objective epistemology and morality? Human minds are only one possible mind in the infinite amount of possibilities that "mind-space" allow. They were created by evolution, a process that maximizes genetic fitness, not truth or goodness. Say we find an alien species that definitively have universals, but they are radically different from ours, would that universality really constitute evidence for objectivity?

@Mon000

Жыл бұрын

Yes, this is a good point, one that I have heard Lance Bush make. A way to wiggle around it is just to say yes, there is going to be an objectivity for all humans (if we assume we can find some logical and epistemic universals we all share due to our common evolutionary past and build from there). But, this notion of objectivity goes out of the window when dealing with alien species. We would then fall back into the tolerance paradigm. We may hope though, due to the constant nature of the laws of physics that govern the universe (or something of the sort) that actually it would always be possible to find a common foundation even between alien species.

@hedi9221

Жыл бұрын

@@Mon000 About the evolution and the possible moral sense of the aliens, there is this excellent video (in French) kzread.info/dash/bejne/oahl1K18nsvAe7A.html&ab_channel=HomoFabulus

@lloydgush

10 ай бұрын

Actually, the tie of human universals with epistemology and morality are quite clear. Specially because human fitness is it's ability to create it's own niche from nature. The erros of chomsky in what he predicts are human language universals, mainly his focus on grammar. Also, coherence is an universal, I can't see how exceptions on grammar would disprove that.

this a good video bc it's justifies the work of post modernists without reactionary dismissal

Another explanation of similarities in grammar having nothing to do with human nature is that as a tool grammar should with time get better fit to its purpose of communication so as far as we recognize grammar as some particular kind of tool we will find similarities in the structure of different grammars.

The blank slate may be a problem for the rationalist but the empiricist may still be able to establish universals in the form of a commonly shared experience. All or at least almost all humans feel hunger, thirst and pain. They have the same senses through which they learn and come to know the world. But of curse there is still a problem. Even if we have common sensory experience this doesn’t tell us what to construct on it. In other words, how can a blank slate learn anything? If they learn by trial and error how can they recognize a error as such? If they learn by mimicking the behavior of others then how can they identify an employ such behavior? It seems like that humans need a innate ability to cognize and interpret sensory patterns.

Chomsky idea of universals sounds very good, until you see his focus on grammar.