The epistemic status of the human sciences: Critical reflections on Foucault
| Abstract | Any reader of Foucault's corpus recognizes fairly quickly that it is animated by an ethical impulse, namely, to liberate individuals from a kind of oppression from which they suffer. This oppression, however, does not involve the familiar tyranny of the Leviathan or the totalitarian state; it exploits instead values that the victim of oppression herself accepts, and which then leads the oppressed agent to be complicit in her subjugation. It also depends, crucially, on a skeptical thesis about the epistemology of the social sciences. It is this conjunction of claims-that individuals oppress themselves in virtue of certain moral and epistemic norms they accept-that marks Foucault's uniquely disturbing contribution to the literature whose diagnostic aim is, with Max Weber, to understand the oppressive character of modernity, and whose moral aim is, with the Frankfurt School, human liberation and human flourishing. I offer here both a reconstruction of Foucault's project - focusing on the role that ethical and epistemic norms play in how agents subjugate themselves - and some modestly critical reflections on his project, especially the weaknesses in his critique of the epistemic standing of the human sciences. | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,875 |
| External links |
  Try with proxy. |
| Through your library | Only published papers are available at libraries |
Similar books and articlesKarsten R. Stueber (2012). Understanding Versus Explanation? How to Think About the Distinction Between the Human and the Natural Sciences. Inquiry 55 (1):17 - 32.
Adam T. Smith (1994). Fictions of Emergence Foucault/Genealogy /Nietzsche. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 24 (1):41-54.
Philip Percival (2002). Epistemic Consequentialism: Philip Percival. Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 76 (1):121–151.
Geoff Danaher (2000). Understanding Foucault. Sage Publications.
Christopher Cordner (2004). Foucault and Ethical Universality. Inquiry 47 (6):580 – 596.
Ronald Beiner (1995). Foucault's Hyper‐Liberalism. Critical Review 9 (3):349-370.
Hubert L. Dreyfus (1987). Foucault's Critique of Psychiatric Medicine. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 12 (4):311-333.
Amy Allen (2003). Foucault and Enlightenment: A Critical Reappraisal. Constellations 10 (2):180-198.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2009-01-28Total downloads39 ( #30,457 of 556,840 )Recent downloads (6 months)1 ( #64,931 of 556,840 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
