[idontknowtech]

Foucault is the primary intellectual force behind the contemporary social science trend of seeing everything through a power relationships lens. His influence cannot be overstated, at least in the American academy. It's bizarre.

[slowhadoken]

I’ve read Foucault. I’m familiar with western and continental philosophy. I studied psychology, sociology, and political science too. Foucault‘s influence, as well as French existentialism and post-structuralism in general, are to blame for the current state of social science. Boiling everything down to a cultural power struggle is a pyramid scheme, a cult that infiltrated American academia. It’s certainly not a moral philosophy and Foucault’s life reflects that.

[jancsika]

It's bizarre to see you argue on the one hand that he negatively impacted the quality of social science research, then on the other hand declare by fiat that his personal life counts as data point against the quality of the same work!

Foucault's writing is problematic because the conclusions he makes are too broad and are backed up by too much conjecture. So were a lot of other writers of the time, many of whom Sokal covered in his book "Fashionable Nonsense."

[slowhadoken]

I'm saying he used for moral relativism as a way to rationalize his immorality. Foucault's "Fashionable Nonsense" was problematic because it rationalized things like pedophilia which he also strongly advocated for in public along with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

[idontknowtech]

Couldn't agree more fully. It's a shallow lens that's not very good at prediction.

[Karrot_Kream]

With the problems of modernism apparent in the philosophical academy, continental and especially leftist philosophy had a huge void of ideas. Post-structuralism took root precisely because it shrugged the idea of having An Answer but also explained many of the problems with modernism and salvaged the ideas of the Left as best as it could without having to exhume Hegel viz Marx. Rational critiques of post-structuralism remain as lurid as ever but I still see a huge void in modern western philosophy that post-structuralism dances in the ashes of.

If anyone is aware of other non-rationalist western philosophies, I'd be curious as I'm only aware of the Lacanian schools and then more standard post-structuralist stuff like Foucault and Deleuze.

I'd also be careful of trying to read a philosopher's life inside their ideas. Deleuze led a very bog-standard life for a white man in the postwar era in Europe despite advocating for fairly radical philosophies. It's the ideas that take root and shape the academy and then society. If you wish to push back on post-structuralism, criticize the idea, not the people. Foucault himself may have been depraved, but others certainly weren't.

[slowhadoken]

You can analyze the philosopher and their work. Socrates' system of thought can be understood without knowing he fought in the Peloponnesian War, that he was beloved, and that his wife was a shrew. But his philosophy makes even more sense when you know those personal details because context matters. For instance David Hume was an empiricist but accounts of his life make little to no sense. Besides motivations, personal details usually illustrate the limitations to a philosophy. That being said I don't think of Foucault as a philosopher, I think of him as a rhetorician and charlatan.

[Der_Einzige]

The very fact that Max Stirner, and anything from anyone with some notion of "Anarchism" in their ideological descriptions is explicitly not something you're aware of is very telling of how the main stream academy has unjustly left Egoism and related ideas to languish in obscurity.

Stirner was prophectic in calling out Hegel's and Marx's bullshit, and the way that his work triggered Marx so hard that Marx felt the need to write an entire book calling him a doo-doo head (The German Ideology) shows that he was subversive in the best way possible - he got under the skin of a thinker whose legacy is hundreds of millions of people dead. I suggest giving him a read, as he has a truly non-rationalist philosophy which is very different from any that you've read before.

Re: Deleuze being "bog standard". You think that doing tons of LSD with his homie Guattari while they wrote Anti-oedipus was "normal"? One of them even killed themselves by throwing themself out of a window (supposedly due to "chronic pain" but who the heck knows with their literal schizoanalytical ideas)