(no subject)

[mllelaurel]

This just in: Foucault has cured my insomnia. Give the man a medal!

I know I lose my sexuality guru cred by saying this, but while Foucault has some interesting ideas when you distill him, you have to wade through a lot of boring rhetoric in order to get to the good stuff, and I'm not known for my patience with rhetoric.

Comments

[theashgirl.livejournal.com]

Reading Foucault is a special kind of torture.

[mllelaurel.livejournal.com]

Yes! Special torture, to be administered to those who belong in a special hell.

[annotated_em]

*laughing* Yeah, theory is like that.

[mllelaurel.livejournal.com]

And that is why I'll never take a Philosophy class. Neither my GPA nor my sanity would be able to withstand it.

[natbudin.livejournal.com]

Hey now. As a philosophy major, I'd like to point out that there's an awful (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Scientific_Discovery) lot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groundwork_of_the_Metaphysics_of_Morals) of (http://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Yale-Nota-Bene/dp/0300084552/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-6628311-0721443?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1189799945&sr=8-1) philosophy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_on_the_Method) out there that is perfectly readable.

(NOTE: my having linked to something in no way implies that I agree with its method, content, or conclusions... just that I didn't find it too awful to read.)

[mllelaurel.livejournal.com]

Very true. In general, though, my mind doesn't deal terribly well with the abstract. Problem is, I apply the same criteria of 'tell me why I care' to nonfiction than I do to fiction. If there's no story being told- true or fictional, I start tuning out. Socio-political or directly instructional (textbook) works may be exceptions to the rule, but that's because I'm generally given their background and immediate application (there may not be a story within the text, but its context can also serve this purpose). To wit: I'd like Foucault a lot better if he grounded his same theories in examples from his own life or the lives of others. And so forth.

[natbudin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I can see that. Some of the philosophers I linked to actually bother to do that, too - Popper's "hook," if I may call it that, is "psychology isn't actually a science and I'm going to tell you why." Dahl pretty much does it explicitly - in the book I linked to, his starting point is "you live in a democracy, so you should try to understand what democracy is actually all about."

Kant doesn't particularly try to make you care, but (at least in the book I linked to) he's fairly concise and to-the-point, and gets to some really clever ideas pretty quickly.

Descartes, on the other hand, really tries to make you understand where he's coming from, but I don't think he does too good a job of that. Anyone who starts their thinking by doubting his own existence seems a little bit off the rails to me. That's not to disparage what is undoubtedly one of the most important works of Western philosophy ever written - but I should also say that it's far from my only problem with Descartes. :)

[mllelaurel.livejournal.com]

I disagree with Popper's hook, so we're unlikely to see eye to eye. Dahl, on the other hand, sounds interesting. Him I think I might read. Kant and Descartes are a bit too straight-up philosophy for me, but at least I know who they are, so I don't feel entirely like an idiot.

[natbudin.livejournal.com]

I'd be happy to lend you my Dahl book sometime when you're in town.

As far as Karl Popper, I don't think you're meant to agree with his hook - it's supposed to pull you in by being controversial. It's also worth keeping in mind that when Popper wrote it, psychology was essentially synonymous with Freud, which I'm told is significantly less true now than it used to be. What Popper is basically saying (and this was very, very controversial at the time) is that Freud's work can't be classified as scientific research - bearing in mind that that doesn't make it any less valid or true.

[natbudin.livejournal.com]

BTW, I should also publicly admit, before I go too much further with this, that I've never read Foucault, and I'm also an unabashed modernist and technocrat, so I doubt I'd have a whole lot of sympathy for his point of view, from what little I've heard about him. (Although my brother, thehumanclams, is a big fan of his.)

[unluckylasers.livejournal.com]

I, uh...I think Foucault is kind of cool. :(

(Not that I've read him EXTENSIVELY, but I liked what I did read.)

[mllelaurel.livejournal.com]

Like I said, the theories are interesting, but god, the rhetoric.

[heavenscalyx.livejournal.com]

:) My wife just assigned a couple of chapters of Discipline and Punish to her froshies. To read in their first week of school. She is an Evil Professor.

To give her credit, she thought that the program's requirement for frosh in the writing intensives to write an essay on their first day of class was rather over the top, and told her class so.

So I read your post aloud to her. There was a pause, and then a Dr. Narbon-esque (http://www.webcomicsnation.com/shaenongarrity/narbonic_plus/series.php?view=archive&chapter=22744&name=narbonic_plus) "Heh heh heh" resounded from the next room.

Or perhaps I imagined it. :}

[mllelaurel.livejournal.com]

Poor, poor froshies. ^__^

I'm quite liking your wife, from this description.