In his renowned courses at the Collège de France from 1982 to 1984, Michel Foucault devoted his lectures to meticulous readings and interpretations of the works of Plato, Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius, among others. In this his aim was not, Edward F. McGushin contends, to develop a new knowledge of the history of philosophy; rather, it was to let himself be transformed by the very activity of thinking. Thus, this work shows us Foucault in the last phase of his (...) life in the act of becoming a philosopher. Here we see how his encounter with ancient philosophy allowed him to experience the practice of philosophy as, to paraphrase Nietzsche, a way of becoming who one is: the work of self-formation that the Greeks called _askésis_. Through a detailed study of Foucault's last courses, McGushin demonstrates that this new way of practicing philosophical _askésis_ evokes Foucault's ethical resistance to modern relations of power and knowledge. In order to understand Foucault's later project, then, it is necessary to see it within the context of his earlier work. If his earlier projects represented an attempt to bring to light the relations of power and knowledge that narrowed and limited freedom, then this last project represents his effort to take back that freedom by redefining it in terms of care of the self. Foucault always stressed that modern power functions by producing individual subjects. This book shows how his excavation of ancient philosophical practices gave him the tools to counter this function-with a practice of self-formation, an _askésis. _. (shrink)

Do historians need philosophy? The paper suggests that historians do not need philosophical doctrine or theory, or philosophical method, but that in so far as historians are writing their own time anew and are rewriting the past, they might find some help in a particular philosophical ethos: an ethos of discomfort or attentive study. First, how Koselleck describes the price that historians have paid for writing their own time anew and for rewriting the past will be sketched. This price entails, (...) as will be argued, an uncomfortable exposition and estrangement of the researcher or writer. It is then suggested that such exposition and estrangement is also what is at stake in the ethos of a particular philosophical tradition implying exercises or askesis of uncomfortable exposition. This ethos will be sketched following Foucault, calling himself a historian of the present, not in order to intervene in the many controversies amongst historians surrounding his work but in order to support the initial suggestion that philosophy might be of some help for historians. Moreover the article will indicate how philosophy in this sense is intrinsically an educational endeavour, although not an issue of learning. (shrink)

Shortly after the publication of The Reflective Practitioner (1983) and the sequel Educating the Reflective Practitioner (1987) ‘reflection-in-action’ became a major concept in teacher education. The concept has, however, been criticised on ontological/epistemological as well as practice oriented accounts (Van Manen, 1995; Newman, 1999; Erlandson, 1995). In this paper I argue that reflection-in-action is a theoretical construction that snatches the interacting, working, and producing bodies from their practices, and consequently, matters of politics, of discipline, of institutional interaction and of the (...) workings of social categories are reduced to matters of thinking. Turning to Foucault (1991) I claim that the doctrine of reflection is interwoven in the logic of discipline. (shrink)