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Michel Foucault
Paul-Michel Foucault (, ; ; 15 October 192625 June 1984) was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, writer, political activist, and literary critic. Foucault's theories primarily address the relationships between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. Though often cited as a structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels. His thought has influenced academics, especially those working in communication studies, anthropology, psychology, sociology, criminology, cultural studies, literary theory, feminism, Marxism and critical theory. Born in Poitiers, France, into an upper-middle-class family, Foucault was educated at the Lycée Henri-IV, at the , where he developed an interest in philosophy and came under the influence of his tutors Jean Hyppolite and Louis Althusser, and at the University of Paris ( Sorbonne), where he earned degrees in philosophy and psychology. After several years ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Western Philosophy
Western philosophy encompasses the philosophical thought and work of the Western world. Historically, the term refers to the philosophical thinking of Western culture, beginning with the ancient Greek philosophy of the pre-Socratics. The word ''philosophy'' itself originated from the Ancient Greek (φιλοσοφία), literally, "the love of wisdom" grc, φιλεῖν , "to love" and σοφία '' sophía'', "wisdom"). History Ancient The scope of ancient Western philosophy included the problems of philosophy as they are understood today; but it also included many other disciplines, such as pure mathematics and natural sciences such as physics, astronomy, and biology (Aristotle, for example, wrote on all of these topics). Pre-Socratics The pre-Socratic philosophers were interested in cosmology; the nature and origin of the universe, while rejecting mythical answers to such questions. They were specifically interested in the (the cause or first principle) of the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
University Of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant university and the founding campus of the University of California system. Its fourteen colleges and schools offer over 350 degree programs and enroll some 31,800 undergraduate and 13,200 graduate students. Berkeley ranks among the world's top universities. A founding member of the Association of American Universities, Berkeley hosts many leading research institutes dedicated to science, engineering, and mathematics. The university founded and maintains close relationships with three national laboratories at Berkeley, Livermore and Los Alamos, and has played a prominent role in many scientific advances, from the Manhattan Project and the discovery of 16 chemical elements to breakthroughs in computer science and genomics. Berkeley is ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
History Of Ideas
Intellectual history (also the history of ideas) is the study of the history of human thought and of intellectuals, people who conceptualize, discuss, write about, and concern themselves with ideas. The investigative premise of intellectual history is that ideas do not develop in isolation from the thinkers who conceptualize and apply those ideas; thus the intellectual historian studies ideas in two contexts: (i) as abstract propositions for critical application; and (ii) in concrete terms of culture, life, and history. As a field of intellectual enquiry, the history of ideas emerged from the European disciplines of '' Kulturgeschichte'' (Cultural History) and ''Geistesgeschichte'' (Intellectual History) from which historians might develop a global intellectual history that shows the parallels and the interrelations in the history of critical thinking in every society. Likewise, the history of reading, and the history of the book, about the material aspects of book production (des ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Historical Epistemology
French philosophy, here taken to mean philosophy in the French language, has been extremely diverse and has influenced Western philosophy as a whole for centuries, from the medieval scholasticism of Peter Abelard, through the founding of modern philosophy by René Descartes, to 20th century philosophy of science, existentialism, phenomenology, structuralism, and postmodernism. Medieval period Peter Abelard Peter Abelard (1079 – April 21, 1142) was a scholastic philosopher, theologian and logician. The story of his affair with and love for Héloïse has become legendary. The ''Chambers Biographical Dictionary'' describes him as "the keenest thinker and boldest theologian of the 12th Century".''Chambers Biographical Dictionary'', 2011, , page 3 The general importance of Abelard lies in his having fixed more decisively than anyone before him the scholastic manner of philosophizing, with the object of giving a formally rational expression to received ecclesiastical doctrin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Georges Canguilhem
Georges Canguilhem (; ; 4 June 1904 – 11 September 1995) was a French philosopher and physician who specialized in epistemology and the philosophy of science (in particular, biology). Life and work Canguilhem entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1924 as part of a class that included Jean-Paul Sartre, Raymond Aron and Paul Nizan. He aggregated in 1927 and then taught in lycées throughout France, taking up the study of medicine while teaching in Toulouse. He took up a post at the Clermont-Ferrand based University of Strasbourg in 1941, and received his medical doctorate in 1943, in the middle of World War II. Using the pseudonym "Lafont" Canguilhem became active in the French Resistance, serving as a doctor in Auvergne. By 1948 he was the French equivalent of department chair in philosophy at Strasbourg as well. Seven years later, he was named a professor at the Sorbonne and succeeded Gaston Bachelard as the director of the Institut d'histoire des sciences, a post he oc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Non-representational Theory
Non-representational theory is the study of a specific theory focused on human geography. It is the work of Nigel Thrift (Warwick University). The theory is based on using social theory, conducting geographical research, and the 'embodied experience.' Definition Instead of studying and representing social relationships, non-representational theory focuses upon practices – how human and nonhuman formations are enacted or performed – not simply on what is produced.Thrift, Nigel; 1997; 'The still point: expressive embodiment and dance', in Pile, S and Keith, M (eds.), ''Geographies of Resistance''; (Routledge) pp 124–151 "First, it valorizes those processes that operate before … conscious, reflective thought … ndsecond, it insists on the necessity of not prioritizing representations as the primary epistemological vehicles through which knowledge is extracted from the world". Recent studies have examined a wide range of activities including dance, musical perfo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Post-structuralism
Post-structuralism is a term for philosophical and literary forms of theory that both build upon and reject ideas established by structuralism, the intellectual project that preceded it. Though post-structuralists all present different critiques of structuralism, common themes among them include the rejection of the self-sufficiency of structuralism, as well as an interrogation of the binary oppositions that constitute its structures. Accordingly, post-structuralism discards the idea of interpreting media (or the world) within pre-established, socially constructed structures.Bensmaïa, Réda. 2005. "Poststructuralism." Pp. 92–93 in The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought', edited by L. Kritzman. Columbia University Press. Poster, Mark. 1988. "Introduction: Theory and the problem of Context." pp. 5–6 i''Critical theory and poststructuralism: in search of a context'' Merquior, José G. 1987. ''Foucault'', (Fontana Modern Masters series). University of Califor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
French Nietzscheanism
Friedrich Nietzsche's influence and reception varied widely and may be roughly divided into various chronological periods. Reactions were anything but uniform, and proponents of various ideologies attempted to appropriate his work quite early. Overview Beginning while Nietzsche was still alive, though incapacitated by mental illness, many Germans discovered his appeals for greater heroic individualism and personality development in '' Thus Spoke Zarathustra'', but responded to those appeals in diverging ways. He had some following among left-wing Germans in the 1890s. Nietzsche's anarchistic influence was particularly strong in France and the United States. By World War I, German soldiers even received copies of ''Thus Spoke Zarathustra'' as gifts. The Dreyfus affair provides another example of his reception: the French antisemitic Right labelled the Jewish and leftist intellectuals who defended Alfred Dreyfus as "Nietzscheans". Such seemingly paradoxical acceptance by diametric ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Continental Philosophy
Continental philosophy is a term used to describe some philosophers and philosophical traditions that do not fall under the umbrella of analytic philosophy. However, there is no academic consensus on the definition of continental philosophy. Prior to the twentieth century, the term "continental" was used broadly to refer to philosophy from continental Europe. A different use of the term originated among English-speaking philosophers in the second half of the 20th century, who used it to refer to a range of thinkers and traditions outside the analytic movement. Continental philosophy includes German idealism, phenomenology, existentialism (and its antecedents, such as the thought of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche), hermeneutics, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, French feminism, psychoanalytic theory, and the critical theory of the Frankfurt School as well as branches of Freudian, Hegelian and Western Marxist views. The term ''continental philosophy'' lacks cle ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The History Of Sexuality
''The History of Sexuality'' (french: L'Histoire de la sexualité) is a four-volume study of sexuality in the Western world by the French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault, in which the author examines the emergence of "sexuality" as a discursive object and separate sphere of life and argues that the notion that every individual has a sexuality is a relatively recent development in Western societies. The first volume, ''The Will to Knowledge'' (''La volonté de savoir''), was first published in 1976; an English translation appeared in 1978. ''The Use of Pleasure'' (''L'usage des plaisirs''), and ''The Care of the Self'' (''Le souci de soi''), were published in 1984. The fourth volume, ''Confessions of the Flesh'' (''Les aveux de la chair''), was published posthumously in 2018. In Volume 1, Foucault criticizes the "repressive hypothesis", the idea that western society suppressed sexuality from the 17th to the mid-20th century due to the rise of capitalism and bourgeois soci ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Discipline And Punish
''Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison'' (french: Surveiller et punir : Naissance de la prison) is a 1975 book by French philosopher Michel Foucault. It is an analysis of the social and theoretical mechanisms behind the changes that occurred in Western penal systems during the modern age based on historical documents from France. Foucault argues that prison did not become the principal form of punishment just because of the humanitarian concerns of reformists. He traces the cultural shifts that led to the predominance of prison via the body and power. Prison is used by the "disciplines" – new technological powers that can also be found, according to Foucault, in places such as schools, hospitals, and military barracks. In a later work, ''Security, Territory, Population'', Foucault admitted that he was somewhat overzealous in his argument that disciplinary power conditions society; he amended and developed his earlier ideas. Summary The main ideas of ''Discipline ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Order Of Things
''The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences'' (Les mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines, 1966) by French philosopher Michel Foucault proposes that every historical period has underlying epistemic assumptions, ways of thinking, which determine what is truth and what is acceptable discourse about a subject, by delineating the origins of biology, economics, and linguistics. The introduction to the origins of the human sciences begins with detailed, forensic analyses and discussion of the complex networks of sightlines, hidden-ness, and representation that exist in the group painting (''The Ladies-in-waiting'', 1656) by Diego Velázquez. Foucault's application of the analyses shows the structural parallels in the similar developments in perception that occurred in researchers’ ways of seeing the subject in the human sciences. The concept of episteme In ''The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences'' Foucault said that an hist ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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