Books and ideas! Deepen your understanding of Philosophy, Literature, Politics, Ethics, Art & Culture. If your'e a student you might find these videos useful as study guides. Teachers and professors should feel free to use them as resources in their own courses.
I'm an Associate Professor of Great Books at St. Thomas University. My research focuses primarily on Shakespeare and early modern political thought.
I'm also the author of Shakespeare between Machiavelli and Hobbes: Dead Body Politics. (Link below)
When I was 13 years old I have read Miserabilii by Victor Hugo for the first time.From that on, I felt in love with classics and read almost all of them during highschool and university. It’s all about that first book you read. :)
“Subjects” are not “people” and “objects” are not “things” in Foucault’s system of thought, as you incorrectly stated at the start of this video. Foucault is using the language of existentialism in a social context, but he is using words like “subject” with fidelity to the sense in which the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre used the term. The subject is the separate self, or even more to the point, the illusion of the separate self. Foucault argues that subject-making institutions oppress us precisely to the degree that they indoctrinate us to accept the notion that each of us is reducible to an individual subject. At that scale, each individual subject by itself lacks the power to resist the objects or institutions that define each of us down to a single, isolated point. Against the existential threat posed by anonymous institutions and their seemingly vast resources, subjects relinquish their subjectivity, without so much as a single philosophical shot having been fired. And that’s how an individual is effectively oppressed by the state or the corporation. We volunteer for it, because we have been trained to be afraid of ghosts.
Very nice exposition of this work by Foucault. I also found The Birth of the Clinic to be a real eye-opener. Have you a discussion of The Archaeology of Knowledge?
You keep saying Foucault is difficult to understand, but it seems to me that you don’t understand why we can find things “difficult” to understand. Let me ask you something, if I asked you about turnips (I’m being serious) what allows you to “understand” what I’m talking about?
So you might say, well, you’re being asked about what turnips are? So do you already have any data/experience on turnips ? If not do you have any data/experience on things that may bear close relations to a turnip? Another root vegetable perhaps? Do you know a root vegetable? Do you know how they taste or are cooked? The reason why Foucault (or anything for that matter) may be difficult for many to “understand” is because we don’t have enough reference points in our mind, ether to bring to life in our minds what is being talked about/references; We don’t have to always know about turnips, but it would help to at least know about root vegetables If we know neither We cannot understand what Foucault is going on about
Good vid. My feelings are that Foucault is correct and your own thoughts are incorrect. Allow me to elaborate. When we, the subjugated, operate, we operate from given assumptions that mostly have never been tested, I.e we operate within rules without them ever been proved. Most ppl don’t break laws, the small group that does and does so repeatedly may find what those laws are actually about ; the relationships between institutions and subjects and why and how those operate; there is power, a need to control something within those dynamics; Without that interplay you are merely dealing with the idea of power, and one does a poor job of understanding it without the interplay. Foucault is saying that we understand Power only in the interplay; the veil comes away when we resist in the relationship as it were; where we come face to face with the rule, the rule maker etc From afar, with and under all of our assumptions, we don’t really understand power for what it is. We assign an idea of it to institutions generally. But that idea doesn’t exist in a certain reality; meaning an institution isn’t a living real thing , it’s an idea. But in the interplay you see the motivations behind that idea, and that’s the attempt at power and subjugation of its subjects as it were. It’s not easy to explain. As you know. But I suspect you don’t fully dig Foucault, and I don’t mean to say that’s a shortcoming on your part. You simply haven’t rattled against our societal limits enough, which isn’t a bad thing in a way. Survival machines aren’t naturally inclined to hit repeatedly danger zones as it were.
This video isn’t really about tech billionaires like Marc Zuckerberg and their all-too-human desire to control an unknowable and scary future by assembling some resources that could prove handy in an emergency, then stowing them away in a special, remote hiding place, hoping that they will never have a good reason to pull those resources out of mothballs, because the doomsday they feared when they put them together never came. Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, Peter Thiel, and a significant number of other highly compensated chief executives from tech and other fields are constructing satellite command posts in remote areas of the planet because they know that their own business activities stand a good chance of creating the negative side effects that could lead to a complete breakdown of the natural, governmental, and social systems that allow eight billion people to live together today on the Earth, more or less peacefully. But rather than try to change their business activities to reduce the likelihood of global systems collapse, they’ve decided, in Zuckerberg’s words, to continue to “move fast and break things,” retreating to their fortresses of solitude in order to stay safe and keep running things, until the mobs finish destroying each other and the billionaire nerds can emerge from their lairs to build an entirely new civilization on the blank slate of post-doomsday Earth. There’s a lot of documentary evidence showing that this scenario is the one motivating the tech oligarchy to behave in ways that superficially resemble the behavior of “preppers” and other antisocial, paranoid groups. So it’s a shame that instead of working from the oligarch’s stated motives and justifications, you instead chose to pull out of this ball of string a thread leading to the conclusion that this rather odd way for tech executives to use their billions is actually evidence of their shared humanity, their relatedness to the rest of us. I guess you could say the same thing about Hitler’s Wolf’s Lair because, more than anything else, that’s what these bunkers resemble. But that comparison might have led you to a different conclusion: These luxury bunkers are evidence of a certain kind of relatedness, a kind that should make us all stop in our tracks and *really look* at what we are seeing. Before it’s too late.
As a parent of a 4yr old that's really coming into her own as a person, every single day is full of power struggles! And I think it's important we stay firm to teach where lines are
Not all crimes. The ruling is why we cant prosecute obama for bombing american civilians overseas without first an impeachment and conviction in the congress and senate. If a president pulls a gun and shoots someone they can be prosecuted without impeachment.
In short: evil is like a weed that keeps coming back to invade the garden. Therefore, so long as evil exists, those who love good must likewise remain ever vigilant to keep and work the garden to uproot weeds and plant trees so the garden might flourish in the present and beyond.
LOVE THIS! I´m doing a PhD and using Foucault for my analysis and there were some terms that were difficult for me to get. This video helped a lot. Thank you so so much!
@GreatBooksProf - if you want to understand Bacon you need to first know the source of his info on the empirical method. You need to look at his relationship with Paolo Sarpi and Sarpi's writings Pensieri and Arte di Ben Pensare. Sarpi was corresponding with Bacon from 1616 - 4 years before the Great Instauration. Bacon was not the original source: Sarpi was. Bacon = not the genius you think. [ref Webster Tarpley has the info]
What I'm looking to start, or perhaps the term is, revive an intellectual discussion group, much like Oxford profs like C.S. Lewis attended. Maybe it sounds like "an old boys club" in stuffy rooms with heavy drapes and overstuffed chairs, but that's EXACTY what I want to recreate! I long to discuss poets and prose authors amidst a Victorian environment. To me, ambiance is everything!
Great vid Professor. Thanks for including Held's point of view since so many "intellectuals" out there attempt to swipe feminist views under the rug---deeming them insignificant---when, in fact, they point out the flaws of absolute patriarchy and its side effects on understanding humanity as whole---not just 'MANkind'
I've always felt the Liberal Arts help you understand the world better. Not necessarily prompt one towards political action. Basically the more I read the Great Books the more in awe I was of what humans have accomplished. It made me happier not more "critical".
Yes you can go through life and allow circumstances to make you a subject. But what it means to be human is to think for yourself and make yourself into a moral being.
I went into this fully expecting to see that the play within a play meant to work on the conscience of the king is a means of showing that the play "Hamlet" is a piece of art meant to play on the conscience of the audience, as we are equally guilty of metaphorically "killing our brother", "marrying his wife", and "usurping the throne" that rightfully belongs to our "brother's son".
Yes, and how to compare & contrast Ari with Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, Seneca's Epistulae and Epictetus' Discourses and Enchiridion. They somehow all look the same.
One of the best movies about the holocaust is “ Judgment At Nuremberg “. The conclusion of the film points out that “ ordinary,even extraordinary men can be convinced to commit horrendous crimes.” That the crimes committed by the Nazi regime were not done by madmen but by ordinary citizens who supported the regime. It tells the tale of how easily people can be persuaded to do the unthinkable.
