NYC Philosophy and Psychology Readers Community

Are there any proper facts which belong to the subject of epistemology? Or are we simply learning the language and way of life which has been invented and passed down to us? In The Archaeology of Knowledge by Michel Foucault we find a careful analysis of the hidden assumptions which form the bedrock on which we build the rest of our lives. By challenging these foundations Foucault invites us to discourse analysis and genealogy as a way of re-imagining what the future could look like. As is often the experience in philosophy, a tension between freedom and weightlessness is cultivated as we ask how we should live on a foundation we did not choose.

We tend to think of knowledge as something we can state, explain, or justify. Michael Polanyi begins The Tacit Dimension with a simple challenge to that picture: “We can know more than we can tell.”
We recognize a face without being able to describe exactly how. We use tools, navigate our surroundings, learn skills, and make judgments without consciously representing everything that goes into what we are doing. Polanyi argues that this kind of tacit knowing isn't just peripheral to knowledge, it is one of its basic conditions.
From there, the book opens onto much larger questions about perception, scientific discovery, objectivity, expertise, and the limits of formal explanation.

~New location again~

Deterritorialize with us at weekly discussions of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's 1972 first volume of their groundbreaking Capitalism and Schizophrenia. This critique of Freudian psychoanalysis and modern capitalism reframes unconscious desire as a machinic productive force, dynamic multiplicities of flows that can be directed against fascistic thinking toward creative and revolutionary action.

Required reading for this meeting: Ch. 4 "Introduction to Schizoanalysis" sections 1–2 (pg. 273–296)

Are there any proper facts which belong to the subject of epistemology? Or are we simply learning the language and way of life which has been invented and passed down to us? In The Archaeology of Knowledge by Michel Foucault we find a careful analysis of the hidden assumptions which form the bedrock on which we build the rest of our lives. By challenging these foundations Foucault invites us to discourse analysis and genealogy as a way of re-imagining what the future could look like. As is often the experience in philosophy, a tension between freedom and weightlessness is cultivated as we ask how we should live on a foundation we did not choose.