Michel Foucault.Alexis Duclos/AP/REX/Shutterstock.com
In later books such as Discipline and Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality (1976), Foucault’s gaze shifted to systems of power. In a Nietzschean spirit, he coined the term power-knowledge to indicate the involvement of knowledge in the maintenance of power relations. As he argued in the essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (1977), an examination of the notion of truth reveals that
all knowledge rests upon injustice, that there is no right, not even in the act of knowing, to truth or a foundation for truth, and that the instinct for knowledge is malicious (something murderous, opposed to the happiness of mankind).
The movement known as deconstruction, derived mainly from work begun in the 1960s by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), displayed a similar hostility to metaphysics and its quest for totality and absolute truth. Under the sway of Heidegger’s call for “a destruction of the history of ontology,” Derrida endorsed the deconstruction of Western philosophy—i.e., the uncovering and undoing of the false dichotomies, or “oppositions,” inherent in philosophical thinking since the time of the ancient Greeks. In Derrida’s view, these oppositions result from the misguided assumption, which he called “logocentrism,” that there is a realm of truth that exists prior to and independently of its representation by linguistic and other signs. Logocentrism in turn derives from the “metaphysics of presence,” or the tendency to conceive of fundamental philosophical concepts such as truth, reality, and being in terms of ideas such as identity, presence, and essence and to limit or ignore the equally valid notions of otherness, absence, and difference. Because of this tendency, Derrida concluded, there is a necessary relationship between the metaphysical quest for “totality” and political “totalitarianism.” As he wrote in an early essay, “Violence and Metaphysics” (1967):
Incapable of respecting the Being and meaning of the other, phenomenology and ontology would be philosophies of violence. Through them, the entire philosophical tradition…would make common cause with oppression and technico-political possession.
The French philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas (1905–95) attributed the misguided quest for totality to a defect in reason itself. In his major work, Totality and Infinity (1961), he contended that, as it is used in Western philosophy, reason enforces “domination” and “sameness” and destroys plurality and otherness. He called for the transcendence of reason in a first philosophy based on ethics—and in particular on the biblical commandment “You shall not kill” (Exodus 20:13)—rather than on logic. It is no small irony, then, that Continental philosophy, whose roots lay in the attempt by Kant, Hegel, and their successors to defend reason against the twin excesses of dogmatism and epistemological skepticism, should come to equate reason with domination and to insist that reason’s hegemony be overthrown.
A powerful alternative to this view appeared in work from the 1970s by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas (born 1929). Although agreeing with the French Nietzscheans that traditional metaphysics was obsolete and, in particular, that it did not provide a path to absolute truth, Habermas did not reject the notion of truth entirely, nor did he accept the Nietzscheans’ call for a “farewell to reason.” While acknowledging that the notion of truth is often used to mask unjust power relations and partisan class interests, he insisted that the very possibility of such an insight presupposes that one can conceive of social relations that are just and interests that are held in common by all members of society.
Habermas’s The Theory of Communicative Action (1981) was devoted in part to developing an account of truth in terms that did not imply that there exists an “absolute” truth of the kind traditionally posited by metaphysics. Following the doctrines of pragmatism and reinterpreting Austin’s earlier work on speech acts, Habermas contended that ordinary communication differs from other forms of human action in that it is oriented toward mutual agreement rather than “success”; that is, it aims at reaching “intersubjective” understanding rather than at mastering the world through instrumental action. The process of constructing such an understanding, however, requires that each individual assume that the utterances of the other are for the most part “true” and that the other can provide reasons to support the truth or validity of his utterance if called upon to do so. Specifically, individuals must interpret each other’s utterances as true assertions about objects and events in an “external world,” as descriptions of morally “right” actions in a social world of shared norms, or as “sincere” expressions of thoughts and feelings in the speaker’s “inner world.” In this “discourse theory of truth,” the notion of truth, far from being a misguided fiction of metaphysics, is a regulative ideal without which communication itself would be impossible. Avrum Stroll Albert William Levi Richard Wolin The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Citation Information
Article Title: Western philosophy
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 16 June 2017
URL: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Western-philosophy
Access Date: August 24, 2019
Additional Reading General
Useful surveys are Frederick C. Copleston, A History of Philosophy, 9 vol. (1946–74); William T. Jones, A History of Western Philosophy, 3rd ed., 5 vol. (1997– ); and Anthony Kenny, A New History of Western Philosophy, 4 vol. (2004–07). Richard H. Popkin (ed.), The Columbia History of Western Philosophy (1999), contains essays by scholars of the history of philosophy from ancient times to the end of the 20th century. Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, new ed. (2004), ranging from the pre-Socratics to the early 20th century, is witty but idiosyncratic. Ancient philosophy Anthologies
Two good collections of scholarly essays on the ancient period are Christopher John Shields (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Ancient Philosophy (2003); and Mary Louise Gill and Pierre Pellegrin (eds.), A Companion to Ancient Philosophy (2009). Texts
Representative texts by major ancient philosophers are collected in Julia Annas, Voices of Ancient Philosophy: An Introductory Reader (2000); S. Marc Cohen, Patricia Curd, and C.D.C. Reeve (eds.), Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy: From Thales to Aristotle, 3rd ed. (2005); and Nicholas D. Smith, Fritz Allhoff, and Anand Vaidya (eds.), Ancient Philosophy: Essential Readings with Commentary (2008). Medieval philosophy Histories
Étienne Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (1955, reissued 1980), is still the best account of medieval philosophy. Armand A. Maurer, Medieval Philosophy, 2nd ed. (1982), sketches medieval philosophy from Augustine to the Renaissance. Richard C. Dales, The Intellectual Life of Western Europe in the Middle Ages, 2nd rev. ed. (1992), treats the broader intellectual context of medieval philosophy. John Marenbon, Early Medieval Philosophy (480–1150): An Introduction, 2nd rev. ed. (2002), and Later Medieval Philosophy (1150–1350): An Introduction (1987), are good overviews. Peter Dronke, History of Twelfth-Century Western Philosophy, new ed. (1992), treats a crucial period in the later development of medieval philosophy. Joseph W. Koterski, An Introduction to Medieval Philosophy: Basic Concepts (2008), is accessible to beginners but is also useful for advanced students and scholars.