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Taylor, Genealogy, History, Peter Hawes

Honors Theses

In this paper I compare two different genealogies of the idea of the ‘self’: Charles Taylor’s and Michel Foucault’s. I begin by arguing that Taylor’s focus on combating what he calls “subtraction stories” places him in the genealogical tradition with Foucault. I then engage with Foucault's genealogy of the self, which illuminates how the notion of the ‘self’ was constructed as a means of control, which leads him to say we should do away with trying to understand it outside of relations of power. This call for the rejection of the self, I suggest, presents a problem for us, who …

Michel Foucault : Power/Knowledge And Epistemological Prescriptions, Martin A. Hewett

Honors Theses

In an interview in 1977, seven years before his death, Michel Foucault made the following profound and controversial statement:

Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint.

Within this sentence lies perhaps his most contested assertion: that knowledge is not some property of statements or beliefs that exist separately from relations of power within societies and discourses, but is constituted by and constitutive of them. Foucault's genealogies of sexuality and punishment are the most notable means by which he develops this claim, and their own potent explanatory powers leave us …