EXPeditions - The living library of knowlegde

Stuart Elden - Thinking about the question of power with Foucault

Foucault says we need to think about power in a different way. It’s not that power doesn’t work in those ways, but that power doesn’t only work in those ways.
About Stuart Elden"I’m a Professor of Political Theory and Geography at the University of Warwick. My research is at the intersection of politics, philosophy and geography. I undertake my work predominantly through approaches from the history of ideas.
My work over the past decade or so has been in two main areas - the history, concept and practice of territory; and the history of twentieth-century French thought. I've been writing a multivolume intellectual history of the entire career of Michel Foucault. I’m the author of books on Henri Lefebvre, Martin Heidegger and the question of territory."
Key Points
• Foucault says that we’re still thinking about power as being centralised in society.• Power can be understood as power relations: an exchange that goes on within society that is dispersed throughout its institutions.• In `Discipline and Punish', Foucault tries to understand how we moved from a spectacular display of sovereign power, to the regulation of time and space in prisons.
Foucault’s work was often historical in terms of how he approached his topics. His books include histories of madness, of clinical medicine and of the human sciences, of the history of the prison and the punitive society more generally. Then there is his last great project, the unfinished The History of Sexuality, which he was working on at the time of his death.

Peter Salmon - Breaking down deconstruction with Derrida

Novelist and biographer Peter Salmon, discusses deconstruction – the question the philosopher Jacques Derrida never wanted to answer.
About Peter Salmon "I’m a novelist and biographer. I recently wrote a biography of Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher, called An Event, Perhaps.
One of the great things about writing about Derrida was, like me, there were two things he was incredibly passionate about: literature and philosophy. In spending time with someone like Derrida, you learn to think more clearly, more deeply, about many things. Being able to write his biography was thrilling for that reason. I now have ways of looking at the world which I didn’t have before. Hopefully, the biography will help people get into those ways of looking at the world."
Key Points
• Deconstruction is not destruction; it’s investigating how something was constructed, whether it be a chair, religion, justice system or truth.• Derrida was a charismatic figure who had a reputation for being a relativist – someone who believes there’s no truth – but he argued against this position his entire life. He believed an absolute truth can’t be proven.• Derrida’s ideas were important in challenging unexamined assumptions of philosophy that defined humans, such as the white, heterosexual, middle-class male.
In fact, deconstruction has no opinion about whether truth ultimately exists. What it can say, like with God, is we can have faith in truth or we can have faith that there’s no truth, but we can’t prove it. Until then, we have to work with what we’ve got. We have to explore the way that the word ‘truth’ is used, what it does. We deconstruct it.
Now, all of us in our general lives actually do this. If I read a poem, I can say, how true it is. If a friend tells me that their boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife is terrible, I can say, that’s very true. If I do some sums, quadratic equations, I come up with an answer and say they’re true. I move between these registers of truth very easily. I don’t even think about it, unless perhaps I’m reading Derrida. So, that’s what Derrida’s trying to capture: the way that these terms are used, the way that we move between these registers. Derrida’s always trying to capture what it’s actually like to be alive. He thinks philosophers have got it wrong by trying to pin the butterfly, but he thinks they’re valid questions to ask and questions we should be asking. What we can’t come up with is a definitive answer to that.

Kate Kirkpatrick - Sartre, Beauvoir and existentialism

I’m the Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy and Christian Ethics at Regent's Park College, Oxford.
My research focuses primarily on Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and I've written a few books on Sartre and Beauvoir and Existentialism more generally.
About Kate KirkpatrickI’m the Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy and Christian Ethics at Regent's Park College, Oxford.
My research focuses primarily on Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and I've written a few books on Sartre and Beauvoir and Existentialism more generally.
Key Points
• Sartre and Beauvoir’s view of Existentialism emerged in the 1940s. They thought that freedom is what is most valuable in life and that we must build an ethical system around it.• One of the ways that Sartre and Beauvoir expressed their ideas was through fiction. They wrote plays and novels because they thought that the truth couldn’t just be expressed in the form of philosophical treatises.• Beauvoir believes that the character of human beings is established by the kinds of projects that they adopt in life; part of being free is having the freedom to choose different projects to shape your life.
This question is still the subject of debate amongst philosophers today. On the one hand, you get very broad definitions of the category, which include thinkers from the 19th and 20th centuries, primarily – people like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche or Heidegger, as well as French existentialists Sartre and Beauvoir. However, some philosophers claim that the category is so broad that it ceases to pick out any meaningful similarities between the thinkers, because, although they share similar preoccupations, they wrote from very different contexts and came to radically different conclusions.
On the other hand, you get this narrow approach to defining Existentialism, which has appeared in the work of Jonathan Webber more recently. He says that we need to understand Existentialism as a theory of value, which says that freedom is what is valuable, and as an ethical system built on that – that we must treat other people in a way that acknowledges the freedom of each person and the structure of human existence. That view is something that emerged with Sartre and Beauvoir in the 1940s.

Lyndsey Stonebridge - Thinking with Hannah Arendt

Lyndsey Stonebridge, Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham, tells how Hannah Arendt helped her to think.
About Lyndsey Stonebridge"I am Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham, in the UK.I work on the intellectual history and literature of the 20th century, and I’ve written books on war, justice, war-time trials, statelessness, human rights and Hannah Arendt."
Key Points
• Arendt argues that thinking properly involves both facing up to reality and resisting it.• From Immanuel Kant, Arendt took the idea that thinking has moral consequences; from Martin Heidegger, the concept that thinking is really all there is.• Arendt teaches us that because thinking is an everyday activity, it’s radically democratic.
Arendt had the good fortune to be brought up in Königsberg, the home of Immanuel Kant, whom she took very seriously indeed. Königsberg might look like a backwater, but in the 18th century it was incredibly cosmopolitan. It had seven bridges, and there’s this wonderful game you can play which is to try to work out how you can get through the town while crossing each of those seven bridges but not crossing any one twice. This is where Kant, who used to cross those bridges, comes in.
What Kant and his generation worked out is that you didn’t actually have to spend all your life running around the bridges. You can use mathematical reason. You can use pure reason to work out that, in fact, you can’t cross each bridge only once; you have to cross one twice.
Kant was terribly important because he was the first person who said that how we think, and how our mind works, is absolutely constitutive about how we manage to be in the world.

Dana Mills - Simone Weil and the relationship between action and thought

Dana Mills, lecturer in political theory at the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam, discusses Simone Weil and activism.
About Dana Mills "I'm the Director of International Relations at Gisha and I have taught political theory at the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam.
I’ve written books on dance and politics, and especially revolutionary women. Most recently, I wrote a biography of Rosa Luxemburg."
Key Points
• Simone Weil reflected on the relationship between our own actions and the solidarity we might offer others.• In her views on social justice, she shifted the focus from rights to duties: what we owe each other, not what we are owed.• Her concept of attention was a way to move away from the ego and accept that we are only part of something larger than us.
Simone Weil was a Jewish French thinker, theologian, philosopher, activist and organiser who was born in 1909 to a middle-class French family, which gave her a very well-rounded education. Her brother was the mathematician André Weil, who was incredibly famous in his own right.
Simone was an incredibly precocious child. She was very well-read; she read Plato and Pascal as a young girl and fell in love with philosophy, but she was also concerned with the state of the world. From a very young age, she showed a tendency that would last her entire life, which was her ability to identify with people who were suffering. When she was six, she heard that people were starving in France and did not have access to food, so she refused to have sugar in her tea as an act of solidarity.

Barry Smith - Wittgenstein and the ambition of philosophy, logic and language

Barry Smith, Director of the Institute of Philosophy at the School of Advanced Study, discusses Wittgenstein, logic and language.
About Barry Smith"I'm a professor of philosophy and Director of the Institute of Philosophy at the University of London School of Advanced Study.I'm a philosopher of mind and language, and I'm interested in how these systems help put us in touch with the world around us and with ourselves, and I'm especially interested in the senses and our sense of taste and smell."
Key Points
• Originally an engineer, Wittgenstein became deeply concerned with logic, language and the nature of philosophy itself.• In his work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein tries to understand how language can describe reality, suggesting the foundations for a logically perfect language.• Having realised that he hadn’t exhausted the problems of philosophy, Wittgenstein begins to write about the nature of explanation. He thinks that sometimes what we need is not another explanation but a better description.
While trying to understand these big questions about the nature of logic and how science is equipped to describe the ultimate structure of reality, Wittgenstein also wondered: what are we doing as philosophers? What is this subject matter that is not itself science, but somehow comes before or underpins the scientific inquiry? It’s a question to the nature of truth, the nature of representations of reality, the nature of logic. That makes his project very central to philosophy.

Adrian Moore - Kant and how to live in purely rational terms

Adrian Moore, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford, explores the practical use of reason and morality in Kant’s system.
About Adrian Moore"I am Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford and a Tutorial Fellow of St Hugh’s College, Oxford.I study the philosopher Immanuel Kant, who, in my view, is the greatest philosopher of all time. He's certainly my own favourite philosopher and he has informed a lot of my work."
Key Points
• Even though Kant recognised that everything in the physical world is governed by predetermined factors, we are still free agents as we ourselves are part of the underlying reality.• Kant believed that deciding between the right and wrong thing to do could be based on pure reason.• The belief that there are fundamental principles of right living and others that are absolutely wrong has been the most enduring and influential of Kant’s ideas
Kant is writing in the wake of Isaac Newton, and one of the things that Kant believed about Newton’s great scientific discoveries was that they showed that everything that happens in the physical world was completely determined by inexorable laws of nature. So, in principle, if you knew all of the prior conditions before some event and if you knew what all the laws of nature were, you would be able to predict with certainty exactly what was going to happen next. Kant also believed that it was a direct consequence of this that there could be no free will in the physical world, that nothing that any of us does in the physical realm could constitute an exercise of freedom because it was all completely outside our control. If I raise my hand, for example, there's some purely physical story that you can tell about why that happened. No doubt that physical story involves a certain amount going on in my brain but, even so, whatever it is has been determined to go on by antecedent physical conditions stretching all the way back to whatever initiated it. It's a very urgent question for Kant: what possible room is there for freedom, for exercises of free will?

Susan James - Spinoza, the philosopher, and the virtue of fortitude

Susan James, Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, London, discusses why Spinoza’s philosophy is relevant to our lives today.
About Susan James "I’m a professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College in London.Most of my work is about early modern philosophy, particularly the social and political aspects of philosophy in that period. My most recent book is called Spinoza on Learning to Live Together."
Key Points
• In Spinoza’s the Ethics, the crucial question is to learn what we are like and how we can adapt ourselves to our environment and one another so as to live well.• Spinoza says that the key virtue that philosophers need is “fortitude” – fortitudo in Latin.• For Spinoza, fortitude is the desire to put your knowledge to work in the way that you live, to turn knowledge which may be theoretical into practical and to bring the two together so that you always act on your knowledge.
A life on both sides of society
It is strange that a philosopher who lived several hundred years ago should be such a source of inspiration for us now, both for ordinary readers and for academics of various kinds, authors and so on. I think part of the reason may lie in Spinoza’s biography, in the fact that he lived both inside and outside Dutch society.
Spinoza was born into a well-established Portuguese Jewish family within the Sephardic Amsterdam community, in which he grew up and was educated. In his early twenties, he entered into a terminal quarrel with the authorities of the synagogue, who eventually excommunicated him. We can tell from the curse, or cherem, that they pronounced over him that they were deeply displeased with him, partly for his financial conduct but also, it seems, for his heterodox views. Spinoza was already beginning to go his own way. When he left the synagogue, as far as we know, he cut ties with the Jewish community – as the cherem required him to do – and set out to remake himself.

Sridhar Venkatapuram - Health inequalities and social justice

Sridhar Venkatapuram, Senior Lecturer in Global Health and Philosophy at King’s College London, discusses ethical implications of health inequalities.
About Sridhar Venkatapuram"Sridhar Venkatapuram, Senior Lecturer in Global Health and Philosophy at King’s College London, discusses ethical implications of health inequalities."
Key Points
• Health outcomes mirror other social inequalities. In any society, the poorest and least powerful are also likely to be the least healthy.• Many people who suffer from obesity simply don’t have access to nutritious, affordable food in their neighbourhoods.• Freed of the vested interests of lobbying groups, political philosophers can start a conversation about the role of health in a good society.
How can we understand the relationship between health and social justice? The best place to begin is with our understanding that health is created and distributed in society and not only in the hospital, clinic or research laboratory.
If health is created and distributed in society, what are the ethical implications for that? A profound amount of knowledge has been produced in the field of social epidemiology, a sub-discipline of epidemiology (though some would say that all epidemiology is social). What social epidemiologists study is the causes and distribution of disease and health in people.

Lyndsey Stonebridge - Hannah Arendt and the banality of evil

Lyndsey Stonebridge, Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham, talks about Arendt’s reaction to Eichmann’s trial.
About Lyndsey Stonebridge"I am Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham, in the UK."
Key Points
• Arendt coined her famous phrase “the banality of evil” at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, as a way of describing the Nazi war criminal’s utter thoughtlessness about his crimes.• Contemporary examples of “radical thoughtlessness” include sending elderly people back to their care homes to die from COVID-19.• Thinking by itself is never enough. You have to take action to maintain a community in which you can have what Arendt called the “right to have rights”.
Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem, 29 May 1961, United States Holocaust Museum, Courtesy of Israel Government Press Office. Wikimedia Commons.
One of the phrases that Arendt is most well known for is “the banality of evil”, which she coined when she went to watch the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961.
Eichmann was a war criminal who had escaped to Argentina. In 1960, he was captured by Israeli secret services, the Mossad, and brought to Jerusalem for trial. It was an extraordinarily important moment in the world’s coming to terms with the Holocaust.
Arendt’s phrase “the banality of evil” is often misunderstood as her saying that Eichmann was kind of innocent because he was just part of this banal system. But, actually, what Arendt was trying to get at takes us back to the issue of thinking – or the opposite of thinking, which is thoughtlessness.