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The subject of truth : on Foucault’s Lectures on the Will to Know
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Beistegui, Miguel de (2014) The subject of truth : on Foucault’s Lectures on the Will to Know. Quadranti : Rivista Internazionale di Fi losofia Contemporanea, 2 (1). pp. 80-99. ISSN 2282-4219.
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Abstract
This essay argues that in order fully to appreciate the reorientation of Foucault‟s
lecture courses from the 1980s around the concepts of “truth” and “subjectivity,” it is
necessary to read closely his very first lecture course at the Collège de France, Lectures on
the Will to Know (1970-1971), in which, for the first time, Foucault focuses on the event of
truth itself, rather than on a discourse of truth within the social or human sciences.
The lectures delineate the Aristotelian “morphology of knowledge” and “system of
truth” that have dominated western thought, and, with Nietzsche, question its
underlying assumptions. Specifically, they bring out a deeper, more complex
phenomenon, identified as the “will to know,” which reveals the inextricable bond
between truth, knowledge and power. Foucault‟s genealogy of truth reveals the
historical and contingent conditions of emergence of a morphology of thought which
presents itself as natural, necessary, and disinterested. In doing so, however, Foucault
also leaves open the question of whether a different morphology, and a different
subject of truth, might be possible – a question to which he returns in the 1980s.
Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||
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Divisions: | Faculty of Social Sciences > Philosophy | ||||
Journal or Publication Title: | Quadranti : Rivista Internazionale di Fi losofia Contemporanea | ||||
ISSN: | 2282-4219 | ||||
Official Date: | 2014 | ||||
Dates: |
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Volume: | 2 | ||||
Number: | 1 | ||||
Page Range: | pp. 80-99 | ||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||
Publication Status: | Published | ||||
Access rights to Published version: | Open Access (Creative Commons) | ||||
Description: | DETTI, SCRITTI & CORSI : LA FILOSOFIA DI MICHEL FOUCAULT (1984-2014) |
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Date of first compliant deposit: | 5 April 2017 |
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