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I prefer Jean Baudrillard to Foucault, though he can be just as hard to understand at times. I forgot who first said it, but I prescribe to the idea that if you have truly mastered something you should be able to explain it simply to a child.

Foucault and the other postmodernists tend to overcomplicate things beyond necessity. There are things to be learned from them, but I often find their writing was like academic writing of today. Overly complex in an attempt to evade criticism - if others can't easily grasp your point, they are less likely to challenge it.

To that I say the hell with it. They are like the old theologians arguing over if angels could fit on the end of a pin, and just as useful.

Thanks, Colin. I entirely agree with your analysis (though I have not
read Jean Baudrillard).

Colin, Alan Foucault is not a postmodernist. He's a structuralist an entirely different philosophical tradition. Post modernism is about how narratives of authority have lost all authority and it celebrates the momentary.
Foucault and structuralism in general comes out of 'Longue durée' (long duration) history of ideas. He's incredibly dense so to understand him you have to have read Bloch, February and Braudel.
Foucault is considered the greatest philospher of ideas or institutions in the 20th century.

Baudrillard is a postmodernist. Look at Baudrillards concentration on the surface of things and compare that to Foucault's deep historical dives. Chalk and cheese.
I like Baudrillard got every book he published including an original print of and essay he ever published, right back to '68s The System Of. Objects. Yet he was the equivalent of an 80's disco band compared to Foucault's Beethoven.
Don't knock Foucault's hustle. He's actually a master of clarity but you must understand the tradition first.
You want obscure? Try Hegel or Kant.
And I could easily explain Foucault and Baudrillard to children. I know because I have.

February is meant to be Febvre. Sorry for the other minor typos.

I'll take your word that he's not a postmodernist, even though he's always cited as one. In one of my books by him he calls himself an archelogist, and I get that he says it because he doesn't want people calling him a historian.

As to greatest, funny because I hear that about Wittgenstein too. Wittgenstein is tough, but he gets dirrectly to the point.

Baudrillard focused on signs and meanings - applying marxist theory to how the constant replication of the sign changed its meaning. I'm sorry that I don't get your chalk and cheese statement. I guess you mean apples and oranges?

If that's what you mean, the postmodernists all were vastly different from one another, but it's my understanding that postmodernism was the rejection of the modetnists vision that we were on an upward trajectory to success because of the innovations of science, and that thid was caused by the dashing of those beliefs by the attrocities of the 2nd world war. I can read the trauma in the works of Russell and Arendt, so it makes sense to me.

I frankly don't waste a ton of time on them because as I said, as writers they waste your time. Even Baudrillard, whom I enjoyed, started to ramble off into uselessness. I'm sure they are on to something... eventually, but I moved on to Arendt. She's much more thoughtful and interesting.

Appologies for the typos. I have a cracked screen on my phone.

Thanks to Gerard and Colin for your respective thoughts.

I'm truly puzzled by Gerard's statement that Foucault was not a postmodernist, because every account of postmodernism I have seen lists him as a founder of that movement. Still, I find little or nothing of what I understand to be postmodernism in The Order of Things. I can see where studying Foucault might be fascinating for someone who has the time to do so. At my advanced age, however, I must defer to Robert Frost: "The woods are lovely, dark, and deep / But I have promises to keep / And miles to go before I sleep." Perhaps in another lifetime . . . .

ADDENDUM TO MY PRECEDING POST:

For the view that Foucault was a founder of—or at least shared some important views with—postmodernism, see, for example, Gary Aylesworth, “Postmodernism,�� § 3, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; B. Duignan, “Postmodernism,�� Encyclopedia Britannica, September 4, 2020; Maria Baghramian and Annalisa Coliva, Relativism (Oxford, UK: Routledge, 2020), 53��54; and Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody (Durham, NC: Pitchstone, 2020), especially chapter 1 passim, Kindle.

Note: ŷ������ will not allow me to post external URLs for the above-cited references in this “Comments�� section. ŷ������ does allow such external URLs in the “Political Philosophy and Ethics�� discussion group as long as such URLs are not embedded in HTML.

FURTHER ADDENDUM:

Quote from chapter 1 (section titled “The Postmodern Knowledge Principle��) of the above-cited book by Pluckrose and Lindsay:

French philosopher Michel Foucault—a central figure of postmodernism—expresses this same doubt when he argues that, “in any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a practice.�� [endnote citing The Order of Things, 168; 183 in the Kindle edition] Foucault was especially interested in the relationship between language, or, more specifically, discourse (ways of talking about things), the production of knowledge, and power. He explored these ideas at length throughout the 1960s, in such influential works as Madness and Civilization (1961), The Birth of the Clinic (1963), The Order of Things (1966), and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969). [endnote omitted] For Foucault, a statement reveals not just information but also the rules and conditions of a discourse. These then determine the construction of truth claims and knowledge. Dominant discourses are extremely powerful because they determine what can be considered true, thus applicable, in a given time and place. Thus, sociopolitical power is the ultimate determiner of what is true in Foucault’s analysis, not correspondence with reality. Foucault was so interested in the concept of how power influences what is considered knowledge that in 1981 he coined the term “power-knowledge�� to convey the inextricable link between powerful discourses and what is known. Foucault called a dominant set of ideas and values an episteme because it shapes how we identify and interact with knowledge.

Actually, those are things I'm interested in. I'll look up what book he coins that word in.

Thanks Mr Alan.

Colin wrote: "Actually, those are things I'm interested in. I'll look up what book he coins that word in.

Thanks Mr Alan."

As you may know, episteme is the classical Greek word for "knowledge." Plato and Aristotle used it often in their works.

Yes, but its the use of language to control meaning that interests me.

Colin, he might be cited in some places as a post modernist but in most places who as a structuralist for the first half of his career and a post structuralist in the second half. And OK he's considered in the top 5 but #1 in the continental tradition.
Chalk and cheese means exactly the same as apples and oranges. In my country we tend to use chalk and cheese.
I know what Baudrillard focused on. I own and have read every one of his books! The focus on the surface is a way of emphasising that the narratives of the world have now become contingent.
And Arendt is good but hey, she was the lover of that Nazi Heidegger, so meh. She knew what she was doing but chose to close her eyes and pretend ignorance.

Like I said, I'll just take your word for it.

Thought so.

I agree.

That's ad hominem. She actually had the affair twice, and I think it actually informed her understanding on what Heigal called "contradictions."

Thanks, guys. I think we have solved the Foucault problem! Early career vs. later career. He's a deep thinker who could well be correct on some historical matters. But I reject the postmodern view that reason, logic, science, and evidence are to be thrown out the window as merely the "power-knowledge" of privileged White males (the ultimate ad hominem argument). If all knowledge is relative to one's power group, then postmodernism is itself relative to the power group (which just happened to be privileged White males) that came up with the doctrine in the first place. As I have said elsewhere, relativism (whether ontological or epistemic) contradicts itself.

Once we discard reason, logic, science, and evidence, we are back to the war of all against all: power versus power. I reject any notion that human beings are fated to such insanity. Although I myself don't agree with all the postulates of classical physics, science has proved to be self-correcting: see special and general relativity, quantum mechanics, etc. And, a century from now, we may have a better understanding of physics, not to mention biology (I discuss such matters in depth in my book Free Will and Human Life ). The postmodernists are right that certain metanarratives (colonialism, for example) were the construction of the powerful and not objective truth. But the fact that humans are themselves often irrational does not mean that we must throw out human reason itself. That is the proverbial throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

I'll skip over your first paragraph and go to your second.

I'm not sure I agree with your first premise. You lump too many things into your argument. For instance, logic isn't necessary to avoid power vs. power, and more importantly, all of those can exist and power vs. power will carry on.

Imo we are always fated for such instances so long as we have varying goals and limited resources.

What do you mean by objective truth?

Our reason can be flawed, and we often use our reason to justify our own goals. Its why democracy is kind of our best form of politics. Each person's reason is flawed so collectively we can scrutinize one another. It isn't perfect and prone to all the weaknesses of ad populum, but it's the best we've got right now.

Colin wrote: "I'll skip over your first paragraph and go to your second.

I'm not sure I agree with your first premise. You lump too many things into your argument. For instance, logic isn't necessary to avoid p..."

Colin, to respond to your points would require a long discussion, for which I have neither time nor space here. Such matters are, however, addressed in my comments in the “Political Philosophy and Ethics�� topic Reason, Informal Logic, Evidence, and Critical Thinking. I also discuss such issues in my forthcoming book, Reason and Human Ethics, which will be published and available on Amazon.com at a very reasonable price by the end of this year.

ADDENDUM TO MY PRECEDING POST:

I have just now substantially revised post 1 in the Reason, Informal Logic, Evidence, and Critical Thinking topic of this group. The revised post includes a somewhat lengthy excerpt from the draft of Chapter 2 of my forthcoming book Reason and Human Ethics. Refresh your screen at that location to be sure that you see the revised version of this post.

The excerpt from Reason and Human Ethics set forth in that revised post should answer at least some of Colin’s questions.