Between Care of the Other and Truth-Telling: The Place of Epicureanism in the Interrupted Dialogue between Michel Foucault and Pierre Hadot

Testa, Federico (2024) Between Care of the Other and Truth-Telling: The Place of Epicureanism in the Interrupted Dialogue between Michel Foucault and Pierre Hadot. In: Hadot and Foucault on Ancient Philosophy. Brill, pp. 263-285. ISBN 978-90-04-69351-7

Full text not available from this repository. (Request a copy)

Abstract

This text revisits the interrupted dialogue between Michel Foucault and Pierre Hadot, seeking to address the latter’s criticism according to which Foucault doesn’t sufficiently consider Epicurean philosophy, while making pleasure (plaisir) the guiding thread in his study of ancient philosophical practices. The paper seeks to articulate the underlying philosophical presuppositions of Hadot’s criticism, especially that which I call his ‘philosophical anthropology’, in which the analysis of the ancient philosophical schools plays a key role, concretely and historically instantiating fundamental poles of human spiritual experience. By highlighting the differences between Foucault and Hadot, and showing that the ‘anthropological’ option is not available within the former’s approach, I go on to develop Foucault’s treatment of Epicureanism in his 1981-2 lecture course at the Collège de France, showing that far from neglected this school played a conceptually organizing role in his studies of ancient philosophy. I focus on the role that Epicureanism plays in the analysis of the notion of parrhēsia in Foucault’s work, and then analyse the different modalities of relation to others that parrhēsia presupposed in his reading of Epicurean circles. My main concern is showing that parrhēsia appears both as an egalitarian and therapeutic modality of truth-telling between friends and as a practice of confession that will be fundamental for the history of Western subjectivity (an insight I intend to develop in detail in future work).

Item Type:	Book Section
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences > Norwich Medical School
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	07 Oct 2024 15:30
Last Modified:	07 Oct 2024 15:30
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/96922
DOI:	10.1163/9789004693524_014

Actions (login required)

View Item