Unapologetic Theology: A Christian Voice in a Pluralistic Conversation by William C. Placher

Author:William C. Placher [Placher, William C.]
Language: eng
Format: azw
Publisher: Presbyterian Publishing Corporation
Published: 1988-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

NOTES

1. The figure most obviously absent from this chapter is Jacques Derrida. Many of the same questions I discuss in connection with Foucault and Rorty would arise in his case, and they deal more directly with the moral issues I wanted to address. I felt that, if I were to say anything at all about Derrida, I would, to be fair, have to say so much that this would turn into a very different book.

2. These themes run throughout Foucault’s work, but his development is a complicated story. I will be concentrating on his later work.

3. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, trans. Colin Gordon and others (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), p. 131.

4. Mark Poster, Foucault, Marxism and History (Oxford: Polity Press, 1984), pp. 95–96.

5. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), p. xv.

6. Michel Foucault, intro., Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite, trans. Richard McDougall (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), pp. vii–viii.

7. See, e.g., Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” in Paul A. Rabinow, The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), p. 343. Hilary Putnam has made the nice point that Foucault makes many of the arguments for relativism one finds in anthropologists, but most anthropologists want us to respect the alternative rationalities of other cultures, while Foucault wants to undermine the apparent rationality of our own (Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History, pp. 161–162; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

8. Nancy Fraser, “Michel Foucault: A ‘Young Conservative’?” Ethics 96 (1985), p. 172.

9. Charles Taylor, Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 152.

10. Foucault writes what seem devastating exposés of certain appalling medical practices but then insists, “This book has not been written in favor of one kind of medicine as against another kind of medicine, or against medicine and in favor of an absence of medicine. It is a structural study that sets out to disentangle the conditions of its history from the density of discourse, as do others of my works” (Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, trans. A. M. Sheridan, p. xix; London: Tavistock Publications, 1973).

11. For readings of Foucault that emphasize these two different sides, see David Hoy, “Power, Repression, Progress: Foucault, Lukes, and the Frankfurt School,” Triquarterly 52 (1981), pp. 43–63; and Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul A. Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). For a good statement of the issue, see Fraser, “Michel Foucault: A ‘Young Conservative’?” p. 167. Near the very end of his life, Foucault seems to have shifted his views on these issues yet again, rejecting radical relativism, denying that he had ever said that knowledge and power were equivalent, and insisting that political regimes need to take questions of truth seriously. See Michel Foucault, “Le souci de la verité,” Magazine Littéraire, no. 207 (May 1984), p. 18; and Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration (London: Verso, 1987), pp. 218–219.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.