Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophies this. This show is made possible by people that

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Joe's also made possible by people that go through the Amazon banner,

located on the front page of Philosophiesys.org. Today's episode is the beginning of a look

into what at the time was a new attitude that's emerging in the post-structuralist world.

We're looking at the book Simulacra and Simulation by Jean-Baud Riyard. I hope you love the show today.

So for the sake of time at the beginning here, I need to move pretty quickly through

several points we've already covered on the show without re-explaining them. So if any of this

seems like it needs more explanation, you can always go back and listen to all the episodes we've

done so far on structuralism and post-structuralism. But for the sake of right now, we just talked about

Foucault's work. His famous genealogies and archaeologies are the way we've looked at madness

and criminal punishment and sexuality. And while there's a lot of subtext to these works,

one of the major points Foucault's making with these books overall is that terms like

sanity versus insanity, heterosexual versus homosexual, a criminal mind versus a mind that's

been properly reformed. These are just three of hundreds of different new ways in our modern world

that science categorizes human beings and labels them normal or abnormal in an attempt to

classify and understand them. And that just in the relatively short period of recorded human

history that we have access to, there's no shortage of examples Foucault can point to of societies

that just never used these terms to categorize people. Nobody ever used to classify people in these

terms. They had their own terms they used to categorize people, and we can see that those terms

had huge effects on the way these groups were treated within those societies. But aside from

pointing out that our new scientific categories similarly affect the way people are looked at in our

...