Starting with Foucault: An Introduction to Genealogy, Second Edition

The Domai~s uf At.l,ak)jsis 19jective standards for intellectual inquiy9 less bemuse historical or contextualstandards are thought preferable, but because recourse to anything elseis thought. impossible, For philosophers, as opposed to, say? inteIfectual historians,the fundamental problem with Foucault's claims is that they areseen as entailing denial of 'kxternal") reality,'Foucault" views are unquestiona biy historicist. He maintains that"forms of rationality are created endlessly"' ad rejects as fundamentallymisconceived the coneeprion of any farm ol intellectual inquiry as havingaccess to objective external correctness-criteria." This is the basic similariqbetween Foucault and Rorty3 who contends that there is ""no criterion thatW have not created in the cowse of creating a practke*" Hence there is norationalitf: "that is not obedience to our own ~onventions.'*~Ahistorical conception of rationality is the moss fundamental presuppositionFoucautt challenges. Analytic philosophy is characterized by a conceptionof rationaliq as ahistsric in being necessarily prior to all intellectualinquiy and as transcending disciplinary* temporal, and cultural contexts.Against this, it is part of^ FoucauIt"s project to "isolatld the form of rationalitypresented as dominant, and endowed with the status of the one-and-only reason." He wants to demonstrate that our rationali~ "is only Gonepossible form among others.""@ As for the tradition he opposes, he chargesthat it "agerates as though a rational critique of rationality were impossible,or as though . . . a contingent history of reason were impossible*"i1The furor over Berrida" hhonorary Cambridge degree provides a practicalexample of what Foucault has in mind, David-Hillel Ruben claimed in TG;)eTimes correspondence that although ""philosophers love a good argumentabout anything,'Werrida disqualified himself from participaticln in sucharguments, The reason was that he questioned yhilosophers"ules for"clear, rigorous, rational di~cussion,"~ ""Evidently ""anything" &es not includethe rules by which argument is conducted, so if one questions thoserules, one is being irrational.The akistoricist/hissoricist contrast between analytic phiXosophrers andFoucault can he summed up in this way, On one hand we have pbiloso-ph~rs committed to real progress in intellectual inquiry governed by ahistoricrationality; on the other we have a philosopher who sees such notionsof progress and rationality as themselves subjects h historical expiication.The contrast is one between those who conceive of themselves as employinga methodology governed by objeaive standards, and someone whaconsiders appeals to objective standards to be constitutive moves in theproduction of a set of norm-setting practices.Foucault's rejection of the idea that objeclcive standards govern intellectualinquiry and enable us to attain perspective-neutral knowledge poses a paradoxof refiexivity. Elilary Lawson describes this as the inescapable "turningback" on ourselves n our beliefs, langtrage, and practices-in the conducf