December 17, 2004
Foucault's toolbox
This is very good news. The first issue of Foucault Studies is now out.
It is a new electronic, refereed, international journal from Queensland, Australia.
The innovative cover design was by Maria Spanou.
It is good news because the journal is fully accessible online, and so it is an open resource. That is a radical break from the closed world of academic journals in which everything is locked up on a subscritption only basis. The digital shift is happening slowly in academia.
So it is good to see the journal operates in the ethos of Foucault rather than than the conservative academic elitism that locks knowledge away from the masses.
A Foucault quote:
"I would like my books to be a kind of tool-box which others can rummage through to find a tool which they can use however they wish in their own area... I would like [my work] to be useful to an educator, a warden, a magistrate, a conscientious objector. I don't write for an audience, I write for users, not readers."
That is how I use Foucault over at philosophy.com You pick what is useful for the job at hand.
Glancing through the articels I noticed this one by Neil Levy. The abstract reads:
"In his last two books and in the essays and interviews associated with them, Foucault develops a new mode of ethical thought he describes as an aesthetics of existence. I argue that this new ethics bears a striking resemblance to the virtue ethics that has become prominent in Anglo-American moral philosophy over the past three decades, in its classical sources, in its opposition to rule-based systems and its positive emphasis upon what Foucault called the care for the self. I suggest that seeing Foucault and virtue ethicists as engaged in a convergent project sheds light on a number of obscurities in Foucault's thought, and provides us with a historical narrative in which to situate his claims about the development of Western moral thought."
I pretty much concur with that, other than to add that his conception of care of self is a radical reworking of classical virtue ethics and the Stoic ethical tradition. Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at December 17, 2004 04:57 PM | TrackBack