The government of self and others
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2010
Language: eng
Number of pages: 402
ISBN-13: 9781403986665
Description: An exciting and highly original examination of the practices of truth-telling and speaking out freely (parresia) in ancient Greek tragedy and philosophy. Foucault discusses the difficult and changing practices of truth-telling in ancient democracies and tyrannies.

The lectures given by Michel Foucault in 1983 at the Collège de France launch an inquiry into the notion of parrẽsia and continue his rereading of ancient philosophy. Through the study of this notion of truth-telling, of speaking out freely, Foucault re-examines Greek citizenship, showing how the courage of truth forms the forgotten ethical basis of Athenian democracy. He describes how, with the decline of the city-states, the courage of truth is transformed and becomes directed personally to the Prince's soul, giving us a new reading of Plato's seventh letter. The platonic figure of the philosopher king, the condemnation of writing, and Socrates' rejection of political involvement are some of the many topics of ancient philosophy revisited in Foucault's lectures. In the midst of brilliant interpretations of Greek tragedy, political theory, and philosophy, Foucault allows us to rethink the role, the significance, and the transformation of practices of parrẽsia from antiquity to the present. Moreover, in these lectures Foucault constructs a figure of the philosopher in which he recognized himself and with this rereading of Greek thinkers he assures his own placement in philosophical modernity, problematizes his own function, and defines his mode of thinking and being. -- Jacket.