Academic

Leiter on Foucault

By Lawrence Solum

Brian Leiter (University of Chicago Law School) has posted The Epistemic Status of the Human Sciences: Critical Reflections on Foucault on SSRN.  Here is the abstract:

Any reader of Foucault's corpus recognizes fairly quickly that it is animated by an ethical impulse, namely, to liberate individuals from a kind of oppression from which they suffer. This oppression, however, does not involve the familiar tyranny of the Leviathan or the totalitarian state; it exploits instead values that the victim of oppression herself accepts, and which then leads the oppressed agent to be complicit in her subjugation. It also depends, crucially, on a skeptical thesis about the epistemology of the social sciences. It is this conjunction of claims-that individuals oppress themselves in virtue of certain moral and epistemic norms they accept-that marks Foucault's uniquely disturbing contribution to the literature whose diagnostic aim is, with Max Weber, to understand the oppressive character of modernity, and whose moral aim is, with the Frankfurt School, human liberation and human flourishing. I offer here both a reconstruction of Foucault's project - focusing on the role that ethical and epistemic norms play in how agents subjugate themselves - and some modestly critical reflections on his project, especially the weaknesses in his critique of the epistemic standing of the human sciences.

Great paper--I would love to have given you more of the text, but Leiter has a "Do Not Quote" request.  Both the reconstruction & the critique are illuminating.

Le

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on October 31, 2008 (boomark / email).