Technology and its interfaces with nursing care, patients and carers, and the home are many and varied. To date, healthcare services research has generally focussed on pragmatic issues such access to and the optimization of technology, while philosophical inquiry has tended to focus on the ethics of how technology makes the home more hospital like. However, the ethical implications of the ways in which technology shapes the subjectivities of patients and carers have not been explored. In order to explore this, (...) poststructural theory, in particular the work of Butler, Foucault, and Deleuze, is used to theorize the relationship between subjectivity and materiality as ethically mandated on producing rather than precluding the development of subjectivities in novel ways. This theoretical understanding is then utilized through a process of ‘plugged in’ as described by Jackson and Massie that aims to link empirical data, research, and philosophical inquiry. Through this process, it is suggested that power, which the empirical data demonstrate, is frequently exercised through medical discourses and restricts patients' and carers' ability to shape the material environment of the home as a place to live and be cared for in palliative stages of illness. Alternative discourses are suggested both from the empirical data as well as other research, which may offer patients and carers the possibility of reclaiming power over the home and their subjectivities. Finally, the dichotomy between the home and hospital, mediated via technology, is posited as being problematic. It is argued the dichotomy is false and should be moved away from in order to allow an ethical embrace of technology in palliative care. (shrink)

: Hundreds of thousands of students in introductory human sexuality classes read textbooks whose covert ideology reinforces dominant heteronormative narratives of sexual dimorphism, male hegemony, and heteronormativity. As such, the process of scientific discovery that proposes to provide description of existing sexual practices, identities, and physiologies instead succeeds in cultural prescription. This essay provides a feminist, queer content analysis of such textbooks to illuminate their implicit narratives and provide suggestions for writing more feminist, queer-friendly texts.

Hundreds of thousands of students in introductory human sexuality classes read textbooks whose covert ideology reinforces dominant heteronormative narratives of sexual dimorphism, male hegemony, and heteronormativity. As such, the process of scientific discovery that proposes to provide description of existing sexual practices, identities, and physiohgies instead succeeds in cultural prescription. This essay provides a feminist, queer content analysis of such textbooks to illuminate their implicit narratives and provide suggestions for writing more feminist, queer-friendly texts.

Hundreds of thousands of students in introductory human sexuality classes read textbooks whose covert ideology reinforces dominant heteronormative narratives of sexual dimorphism, male hegemony, and heteronormativity. As such, the process of scientific discovery that proposes to provide description of existing sexual practices, identities, and physiohgies instead succeeds in cultural prescription. This essay provides a feminist, queer content analysis of such textbooks to illuminate their implicit narratives and provide suggestions for writing more feminist, queer-friendly texts.

This article is a critical methodological reflection on the use of interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA) initiated in the context of a qualitative research project on the experience of seclusion in a psychiatric setting. It addresses an explicit gap in the IPA literature to explore the ways that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology can extend the remit of IPA for noncognitivist qualitative research projects beyond the field of health psychology. In particular, the article develops Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the lived-body, language, and embodied speech, with (...) specific attention to the ethical implications of body and place. It concludes with a discussion on phenomenological reflexivity and prompts a reconsideration of phenomenological methods across a wide range of qualitative research projects concerned with subjectivity and ethical practice, including critical health studies, critical bioethics, and cultural studies that employ a qualitative empirical research design. (shrink)

The ability to dominate or exercise will in social encounters is often assumed in social theory to define power, but there is another form of power that is often confused with it and rarely analyzed as distinct: logistics or the ability to mobilize the natural world for political effect. I develop this claim through a case study of seventeenthcentury France, where the power of impersonal rule, exercised through logistics, was fundamental to state formation. Logistical activity circumvented patrimonial networks, disempowering the (...) nobility and supporting a new regime of impersonal rule: the modern, territorial state. (shrink)

Luce Irigaray classically challenges what she takes to be the masculine foundations of knowledge in Western liberal culture. The present article contends not only that this epistemological challenge implicates a radical feminist politics, but that it is also more helpful in formulating a multicultural feminist theory than is often acknowledged by her readers. This is because her account responds to the false neutrality of liberal feminist approaches to multiculturalism. It does so by supporting, at the socio-political level, transformative genealogical practices (...) that are aimed at fostering women's agency in culturally sensitive ways. However, Irigaray's recent work on multiculturalism does not sustain the necessary continuity between her core epistemological critique and her political claims. In particular, the continuity between her criticism of the West's sexual indifference and the cultural multiplicity of female identity becomes problematic in her recent work. The author finally contends that Irigaray's writings pose difficulties for a multicultural feminism, because they fail to specify the different forms of policy necessary to promote diverse women's equality in the postcolonial contexts on which she recently focuses. (shrink)

In July 1976, Althusser delivered a lecture in Spain on the topic of the dictatorship of the proletariat. At the moment that many Western European Communist parties sought formally or informally to distance themselves from the dictatorships of both West and East, Althusser proposed to examine the emergence of the concept of the proletarian dictatorship in a specificity. The debates of the mid-seventies, he argued, obscured or repressed the concept’s corollary: the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, a notion that made visible (...) the forms of coercion and control characteristic of ‘bourgeois democracy’. To ignore the latter was to risk squandering the opportunities the conjuncture offered and suffer both political and theoretical regression. (shrink)

This essay explores the nature of being visible and its normative dimensions. In a first part, core traits of an anthropology of visibility are sketched, drawing mainly on Hans Blumenberg’s phenomenological studies. In a second part, human visibility is investigated regarding its implications for our self-understanding, for our relation to others, and for the publicness of our existence. Apart from Blumenberg, also Jean-Paul Sartre, Charles Taylor, Hannah Arendt are involved in this examination. In a third part, two ‘basic rights’ are (...) brought into focus: the right to be seen and the right to remain unseen. In addition to the philosophical exploration, texts by Ralph Ellison, Elena Ferrante and Dave Eggers are discussed as literary references. In a fourth part, a performance by Marina Abramovic that thematised the connection of visibility and recognition is introduced and analysed. (shrink)

Military drones combine surveillance technology with missile equipment in a far-reaching way. In this article, I argue that military drones could and should be object for a philosophical investigation, referring in particular on Chamayou’s theory of the drone, who also coined the term “an eye turned into a weapon.” Focusing on issues of human self-understanding, agency, and alterity, I examine the intricate human-technology relations in the context of designing and deploying military drones. For that purpose, I am drawing on the (...) postphenomenological approach developed by Don Ihde in order to systematize the manifold aspects of human-technology relations in a four-level model. This inquiry also includes a critical reflection on the normative implications of this technology. In doing so, I do not intent to offer an exhaustive relational ontology of military drones. I rather aim at providing a framework that is able to capture the core dimensions of this technology and their complex interrelations in a systematic way that has been missing in the philosophical debate so far. (shrink)

One of the most significant contributions of archaeology to the studies of human-animal relations is the concept of the “domestication” of non-human animals. Domestication is often seen as a specific human-animal relation that explains the ways people and animals interact. However, I argue, that “domestication” does not explain anything but has to be explained or “reassembled” by focusing on the many historically specific ways human and animals live together. Thus, the paper tackles the emergence of a “herd”, an assembly of (...) animals, humans and things that appeared in the Neolithic, by following the ways the different agencies—human, animal, material and composite—are involved in the creation of new sociality. Living with animals is always already a material practice. It includes material culture, bodies, gestures, actions, habits, and body skills. It requires new practices and skills of flocking, herding, closing, observing, separating, amassing, and forming a queue; skills to be learned and employed by the participants. However, numerous resistances and translations are encountered and employed along the way, changing everybody in the process. In this way new bodies and persons—human and animal—are created, ultimately leading to the “herd”, a new way of association of animals, people, and things. From this perspective the agency and power is distributed and not confined to one species or group. There is no single locus of power and agency and no hegemony or “domination” but power and resistance that works from everywhere. Living with animals is not a matter of management, control or domination, but it is about making hybrid society work, a matter of politics, for all the parties involved. (shrink)

This study examines the tension between the academic evaluation system and the development of unconventional research agendas. While scholars have studied the evaluation of research that crosses disciplinary boundaries from the perspective of peer reviewers, they have paid comparatively little attention to the experiences of the performers of unconventional science. This study asks how researchers develop unconventional research agendas to address a long-standing health problem and, in the process, make sense of the actions of a site visit committee organized to (...) advise a foundation funding the project. This study develops a process narrative on the development of a specific transdisciplinary team proposing to study premature birth. The findings show that when the performers and the evaluators of unconventional science developed competing understandings of the research agenda, transdisciplinary discovery became limited as a particular research topic became taboo. Yet, the study also reveals how the performers of unconventional science challenged the power of the site visit committee by making it seem as though they followed the committee’s decisions. These findings raise questions about the role of private foundations as funders of academic research and the suitability of traditional evaluation procedures for assessing transdisciplinary discovery. (shrink)

This article argues that the specifically sexual nature of the political violence of the 1947 Partition of British India installs women's bodies as unambiguously sexed and ethnic. Through an analysis of Kirti Jain's 2001 theatre production of Aur Kitne Tukde (How Many Fragments?), I consider how Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs appropriate colonialist and nationalist ideologies surrounding the notion of ‘woman’ as repository of cultural value. The women in Jain's play are not a priori subjects who experience violence but rather the (...) experience of violence makes (and unmakes) them as gendered, ethnic and national subjects. I argue that they come into subjecthood after a violent objectification and are re-constituted by their experience of national and sexual violence. The performance of nationalism – through embodied acts of sexual violence, conversion, martyrdom and state violence – is enacted upon female bodies that are transformed into political artefacts. I ask how bodies are staged and commodified by acts of political violence and argue that marking female bodies through acts of political violence constitutes a mode of transcription to communicate with other men that will encounter this body. (shrink)

The concept of heterotopia challenges political theory, which has often focused on utopic thinking. Foucault describes a heterotopia as a heterogenous space that juxtaposes in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible. Streets, squares and parks form heterotopias when their utopic purity as public space is juxtaposed with the private spaces created by the cardboard boxes and other temporary shelters of homeless people. Since citizenship has traditionally been thought of as participation in a democratic (...) public sphere, how do heterotopias of homelessness challenge the ideas about citizenship? Based on narrative research with homeless people in Poland, I show how the homeless conceive of their marginality. Their participation or non-participation in democracy is not hidden but, on the contrary, very visible in public spaces where they are included as excluded. (shrink)

There has been much discussion about semantics and ideology in systemic-functional linguistics, which has significant implications for critical discourse analysis. This paper attempts to explore the early Hallidayan concept of semantics, contemporary notions of text semantics as proposed by Jay Lemke, and Michel Foucault's discussion of discursive formations, sexuality, the confession, and normalising judgement, to analyse a small corpus of letters to agony aunts in contemporary Britain. Through an analysis of transitivity, hypotaxis, aspect, and modality, the paper constructs a system (...) network which attempts to show how ideology is realised in the text semantics which is then realised in the lexicogrammar. (shrink)

Contemporary sociology mirrors Western society in its general aversion and sensitivity to pain, and in its view of pain as an unproductive threat to cultures and identities. This highlights the deconstructive capacities of pain, and marginalizes collectively authorized practices that embrace it as constitutive of cultural meanings and social relationships. After exploring the particularity of this Western orientation to pain — by situating it against processes of instrumentalization and medicalization, and within a broader context of other social developments conducive to (...) a heightening of affect control — this article builds on Mauss’s analysis of ‘body techniques’ in suggesting that the cultural, physiological and psychological dimensions of pain can be combined in various ways. In examining this point further, we then compare contrasting religious engagements with pain as a way of detailing how it can be positively productive of cultural meanings and identities, and conclude by using these comparisons to illuminate the relationship between the current Western approach to pain and the Christian traditions that shaped the West historically. (shrink)

Bodies and Pleasures has been characterized as a confessional discourse that manages to subvert confessional practice. Here it is characterized and discussed as an askesis that works to transform confessional practice as it transforms the writer/reader. Two questions emerge through that transformation: How is race to be lived? What are the possibilities for political subjectivity in the absence of dualism and the intensification of awareness of our normalization?

: Bodies and Pleasures has been characterized as a confessional discourse that manages to subvert confessional practice. Here it is characterized and discussed as an askesis that works to transform confessional practice as it transforms the writer/reader. Two questions emerge through that transformation: (1) How is race (in particular, whiteness) to be lived? (2) What are the possibilities for political subjectivity in the absence of dualism and the intensification of awareness of our normalization?

: For many years feminists have asserted an "intersection" between sex and race. This paper, drawing heavily on the work of Michel Foucault, offers a genealogical account of the two concepts showing how they developed together and in relation to similar political forces in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thus it attempts to give a concrete meaning to the claim that sex and race are intersecting phenomena.

For many years feminists have asserted an "intersection" between sex and race. This paper, drawing heavily on the work of Michel Foucault, offers a genealogical account of the two concepts showing how they developed together and in relation to similar political forces in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thus it attempts to give a concrete meaning to the claim that sex and race are intersecting phenomena.

This paper considers the advantages of incorporating Foucault's anti-essentialist theory of the body into feminist explanations of women's oppression. There are also problems in that Foucault neglects to examine the gendered character of the body and reproduces a sexism endemic in "gender neutral" social theory. The Foucauldian body is essentially passive resulting in a limited account of identity and agency. This conflicts with an aim of feminism: to rediscover and revalue the experiences of women.

In the Algerian War of Independence, women famously used both traditional and modern clothing as part of their revolutionary efforts against French colonialism. This paper uncovers some of the principal lessons of this historical episode through a phenomenological exploration of agency, religion, and political transformation. Part I draws primarily on the philosophical insights of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty alongside the memoirs of Zohra Drif, a young woman member of the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale, in order to explore the (...) worldly and habitual nature of human agency in contrast to the Enlightenment stress on individual rationality and autonomy. Part II turns to John Russon’s phenomenological interpretation of religion in order to argue for the ineluctable significance of religion on human existence, in contrast to the modern tendency to oppose religious tradition and secular modernity. Part III analyzes the dynamics of intercultural communication, and argues for the political power of phenomenology as a critical enterprise that enables more just and emancipatory visions of collective human life and political transformation to come to the fore. (shrink)

There has been a resurgence of interest in cosmopolitanism in contemporary political theory, based upon the hopeful premise that it heralds an ameliorative response to the malignity of sovereignty's lack and the treacherous violence of sovereignty's excess. The promise of cosmopolitanism inheres in the claim that state sovereignty is and should be supplemented by an international system backed by the legitimacy of international law, grounded in the sovereignty of human rights. Drawing upon Foucault and Agamben, my argument in this essay (...) is that the laudable endeavour of liberal cosmopolitans is flawed in two ways: first, cosmopolitanism cannot escape sovereign violence, because it cannot escape sovereignty; and second, cosmopolitans misconstrue the composition of the very sovereignty they aim to escape. This means that cosmopolitan theorists are unable to identify cosmopolitan practices of sovereignty that also entail forms of violence: cosmopolitan exception. Cosmopolitan exception denotes violent sovereign practices that cannot be differentiated from the protection of rights. (shrink)

What difference does the philosophical revolution of Deleuze and Guattari make to our understanding the early Christianity? In honour of the fortieth anniversary of publication of A Thousand Plateaus, this article argues that the discipline of Christian origins is currently premised on a historically condemned mode of subjectivity, that of subject/object metaphysics. The philosophical processes found in A Thousand Plateaus are particularly apposite to the current dilemma of Christian origins: as a rhizome-book consisting of plateaus, machines, singularities and non-representational concepts, (...) this book models new modes of thinking that can help the discipline rejuvenate itself and accomplish new tasks which are presently beyond its reach – for Deleuzian philosophy privileges the virtual over the actual, becoming over being, machinic transformations over static structures, and semiotics over linguistics. (shrink)

Building on Deleuze’s theories of the becoming of bodies, and notions of the geographic maturity of the disabled body we formulate an emplaced model of disability wherein bodies, social expectations and built form intersect in embodied experiences in specific environments to increase or decrease the capacity of disabled children to act in those environments. We join a growing effort to generate a more comprehensive model of disability, which moves beyond a binary between the individual and the social. Drawing on in-depth (...) case studies conducted with 13 physically disabled children, we consider the intersections between their primary environments (homes, schools and neighbourhoods) and the multiple subjectivities they embody. Ultimately we make a case about the importance of responsive, situated models of subjectivity for the development of adaptations, and that physical and social adaptations must respond to these children’s complex and varied needs and desires. (shrink)

Student engagement and making community happen is a policy manoeuvre that shapes the political subjectivity of the undergraduate student In Australia, making community happen as a practice of student engagement is described as one of the major challenges for policy and practice in research-led universities. Current efforts to meet this challenge, however, merely recode ethical citizenship to a different but nonetheless prescriptive code of conduct,which closes down thoughts of making community happen to a single unified mode of being by appealing (...) to a normalising practice authorised by expert knowledge. In contrast to this position, we use data gathered from undergraduate students’ observations of their university experience, which appeals to an ethico-politics that opens up the question of making community happen to non-normalising practices.Rather than a will to govern that shuts down debate, student discourse opens up thoughts of making community happen to new contestations and diversity over self-government in relation to others concerning questions of lifestyle choices and friendships. In this way,we argue that making community happen as a practice of student engagement is never fully actualised.While this challenge to the limits of student engagement and making community happen may be seen as a threat to our political existence, it is, nevertheless, a risk worth taking in the interest of student learning. (shrink)

This article draws on Foucault's concept of governmentality to explore how recent political moves to legalise ‘flexibility’ mobilises education authorities to make ‘community’ a technical means of achieving the political objective of schooling the child. I argue that ‘flexibility’ in this sense is a neo‐liberal strategy that shifts relations between the governed and the State. In this way, it transforms the idea of schooling from a State run institution for the purpose of ‘community building’ to a community run institution for (...) the purpose of making parents governable by both instrumentalising and institutionalising individualism through the force of community membership. Rather than a form of liberation from bureaucratic rule, the paper exposes how ‘flexibility’ acts as a normalising strategy that works with difference to entangle parents as community members in the process of schooling the child through the moral obligation of the contract. (shrink)

This article contributes to the Deficit Discourse and Indigenous Education 1 project that aimed to investigate and shift the pervasive discourse that frames and represents Indigenous education in t...

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been hailed as a new means to address gender inequality, particularly by facilitating women’s empowerment. Women are frequently and forcefully positioned as saviours of economies or communities and proponents of sustainability. Using vignettes drawn from a CSR women’s empowerment programme in Ghana, this conceptual article explores unexpected programme outcomes enacted by women managers and farmers. It is argued that a feminist Foucauldian reading of power as relational and productive can help explain this since those involved (...) are engaged in ongoing processes of resistance and self-making. This raises questions about the assumptions made about ‘women’ and what is it that such CSR programmes aim to ‘empower’ them ‘from’ or ‘to’.Empowerment, when viewed as an ethic of care for the Self, is better understood as a self-directed process, rather than a corporate-led strategy. This has implications for how we can imagine the achievement of gender equality through CSR. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉ: Cet article présente une critique de la position dite de l’ «ironie morale», une position philosophique passablement répandue dans la culture intellectuelle con temporaine et dont la caractéristique centrale est de mettre en question de façon radicale le concept de vérité morale. En m’appuyant sur la lecture de Foucault pro posée par Robert Réal Fillion, je dégage les présuppositions qui sont au cœur de la position en question. Je souligne ensuite ses implications pragmatiques; en acceptant le gambit épistémologique, crucial (...) en l’occurrence, selon lequel toutes les affirmations d’ordre moral sont en dernière analyse des descriptions fausses, nous renonçons en fait à notre capacité de juger d’une manière signifiante qu’un état de choses, une ligne de conduite, etc., est qualitivement supérieur à un autre. La question ici posée est donc la suivante: étant admis que la conception ironique de la moralité implique cette perte considérable, les raisons fournies en sa faveur sont-elles suffisamment bonnes pour étayer une attitude aussi forte et aussi radicale à l’endroit de la moralité et de la vérité? Ma thèse est qu’elles ne le sont pas et qu’en réalité on s’abuse en acceptant pour nécessaire et inévitable cette conception débilitante de la moralité. Les raisons sur la foi desquelles cette conclusion est admise semblent inattaquables à première vue, mais il se révèle à y regarder de plus près qu’elles sont non concluantes et inadéquates, ou qu’elles requièrent à tout le moins une révision sérieuse. (shrink)

James D Marshall; Wittgenstein on Rules: implications for authority and discipline in education, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 19, Issue 1, 30 May.

The automobile is a key artifact for understanding the relationship between technology and society. As it has developed into a mass-produced and mass-consumed commodity, it has played an increasing role in social life and its built environments. In its most exaggerated manifestation, in parts of the United States, the car is a singular transport mode for expansive urban regions. This social formation, often referred to as “urban sprawl,” has been cited for its environmental and energy impact. Here, the focus is (...) on its social structural impact on motorists as well as on nonmotorists. The auto is a prime example of how material technologies have dynamic and reciprocal relationships with their social contexts. These relationships raise significant ethical issues with regard to the development and application of technology. (shrink)

The issue of power has become increasingly important within psychiatry, psychotherapy and mental health nursing generally. This paper will suggest that the work of Michel Foucault, the French philosopher and historian, has much to contribute to the discussion about the nature, existence and exercise of power within contemporary mental health care. As well as examining his original and challenging account of power, Foucault's emphasis on the intimate relationship between power and knowledge will be explored within the context of psychiatry and (...) mental health nursing. This is to say that the paper will investigate Foucault's account of how power and knowledge are central to the process by which human beings are ‘made subjects’ and therefore how ‘psychiatric identities’ are produced. In doing so, it will be suggested that Foucault's work can not only make a valuable contribution to contemporary discussions about power and knowledge, but can also provide a significant critique and reconceptualization of the theoretical foundations and associated diagnostic and therapeutic practices of psychiatry and mental health nursing. (shrink)

In recent educational reforms in New Zealand, a central assumption has been the existence of a free and autonomous chooser acting as a consumer of education. The present paper examines and critiques this notion of autonomy, as developed within liberal theory. Both Foucault and Lyotard provide materials for this critique of such a self, a self independent of the laws and principles of a community.

Lyotard talks of performativity or the subsumption of education to the efficient functioning of the social system. Education is no longer to be concerned with the pursuit of ideals such as that of personal autonomy or emancipation, but with the means, techniques or skills that contribute to the efficient operation of the state in the world market and contribute to maintaining the internal cohesion and legitimation of the state. But this requires individuals of a certain kind -- not Kantian autonomous (...) persons but Foucault's normalized and governable individuals. In constituting such individuals discourse is critically important. But how discourse effects this through the force of language is not fully developed by Foucault. This paper draws upon the performative account of language offered by John Austin to develop more fully comments made by Foucault on the force or effects of language in constituting normalized and governable individuals for the march of performativity. (shrink)

The paper considers apprenticeship as a model of education that both teaches technical skills and provides the grounding for personal formation. The research presented is based on long-term anthropological fieldwork with minaret builders in Yemen, mud masons in Mali and fine-woodwork trainees in London. These case studies of on-site learning and practice support an expanded notion of knowledge that exceeds propositional thinking and language and centrally includes the body and skilled performance. Crafts -- like sport, dance and other skilled physical (...) activities -- are largely communicated, understood and negotiated between practitioners without words, and learning is achieved through observation, mimesis and repeated exercise. The need for an interdisciplinary study of communication and understanding from the body is therefore underlined, and the paper suggests a way forward drawing on linguistic theory and recent neurological findings. It is argued that the validation and promotion of skilled practice as 'intelligent' is necessary for raising the status and credibility of apprenticestyle learning within our Western systems of education. (shrink)

(1997). Michel Foucault: Problematising the individual and constituting ‘the’ self. Educational Philosophy and Theory: Vol. 29, No. 1, pp. 32-49. doi: 10.1111/j.1469-5812.1997.tb00526.x.

The purpose of the present paper is to offer a Foucauldian critique of Habermas’s theory of law and democracy. Quite famously Habermas viciously attacked Foucault’s positions on law and power in modernity. Those attacks will be taken into consideration here in order to show some deficiencies in Habermas’s own reading of modern law and democracy. My suggestion is that the formal nature of Habermas’s communicative approach fails to take into adequate consideration the question of subjectivity formation. More precisely I will (...) demonstrate that Habermas’s own works show a troublesome ambivalence with regards to the possibility that individuals can participate as ‘unencumbered selves’ to the public life of their community. As a consequence his account turns a blind eye to certain dynamics of power in our society that a Foucauldian approach seems more apt to frame and explore. (shrink)

Critical thinking, considered as a version of informallogic, must consider emotions and personal attitudesin assessing assertions and conclusions in anyanalysis of discourse. It must therefore presupposesome notion of the self. Critical theory may be seenas providing a substantive and non-neutral positionfor the exercise of critical thinking. It thereforemust presuppose some notion of the self. This paperargues for a Foucauldean position on the self toextend critical theory and provide a particularposition on the self for critical thinking. Thisposition on the self is (...) developed from moretraditional accounts of the self from Descartes toSchopenhauer, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. (shrink)