Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is philosophize this. If you want to support the show,

patreon.com slash philosophize this or you can go to www.philosifiesis.org to find other ways

to support the show. You know, you can always leave a review. That's free. Either way,

I hope you love the show today. So we ended last time by comparing the projects of Michelle Foucault

and Emmanuel Kant. Foucault essentially taking one of the main focus points of Kant's work

and turning it on its head. As we talked about, while Kant wanted to take the subjective and

contingent of the world, analyze it, study it, and hopefully arrive at necessary truths about the

way that things are, Foucault, on the other hand, wanted to take things that most people assumed

were necessary truths and show how ultimately they were subjective, contingent, and rooted in history.

To show how what we think of as the truth is often nothing more than just the dominant narrative

of the time we're living. Now, last episode, we talked about epistimase and paradigms. Foucault

questioning the dominant narrative of scientism, of science being this disinterested vehicle for

arriving at the truth about things or facts about the way that things are. Two episodes ago,

we talked about the book Discipline and Punish. Foucault questioning the dominant narrative that we

used to be these barbaric savages that tortured our prisoners, but then we evolved ethically to the

point we've seen the error of our ways and now we treat them in a way that's much more humane.

Well, it'll probably come as no surprise when I tell you, these aren't the only two narratives

that Foucault questioned in his lifetime. In fact, pretty much every major work Foucault produced

is taking aim at some widely accepted narrative about the way that things are. Narratives that he

thinks, when looked at from a different angle, show themselves to be narrow, arbitrary, and potentially

damaging to the people caught in the mix that that narrative is referencing. For example, take Foucault's

1961 work Madness and Civilization. Discipline and Punish is to the way we've treated criminals over

...