he essay "Archaeology and Humanism: An Incongruent Foucault" argues, among other things, that Foucault "endorses a kind of humanism." Moreover, Calvert-Minor attempts to show that without such an endorsement then the curative aspects regarding Foucault's genealogy of subjectivity would be nonsensical.To be sure, the author seems to demonstrate that there is a clear tension in Foucault's oeuvre regarding the Frenchman's changing stance towards, and at times unconscious embracement of, philosophical humanism. Such a claim, if true, would certainly be damaging to Foucault's archaeological and genealogical projects as he stridently rejected humanism in all of its myriad forms.What makes this paper interesting is that it claims that Foucault backslides into two different humanistic positions with respect to at least two of the three principal periods of his work. In this respect, the paper seems to be on the other side of the fence with regard to some recent work in the secondary literature which has also sought to show Foucault's conscious avowal of humanism. For example, Eric Paras argues in his seminal work, Foucault 2.0: Beyond Power Knowledge, that Foucault comes to embrace, quite consciously, many key elements of humanism in his late work. Paras, however, seems to suggest that such humanistic leanings are the direct result of the epistemic and ontological aporias Foucault found himself in at the conclusion of his power/knowledge period and, as such, these leanings were conscious admissions by Foucault that his power/knowledge period explanation of subject formation was in drastic need of revision.
I examine three kinds of criticism directed at philosophical genealogy. I call these substantive, performative, and semantic. I turn my attention to a particular substantive criticism that one may launch against essay two of On the Genealogy of Morals that turns on how Nietzsche answers “the time-crunch problem”. On the surface, there is evidence to suggest that Nietzsche accepts a false scientific theory, namely, Lamarck’s Inheritability Thesis, in order to account for the growth of a new human “organ”—morality. I demonstrate that the passages interpreted by some scholars to prove that Nietzsche is a Lamarckian can be reinterpreted along Darwinian lines. I demonstrate that Nietzsche hits upon the right drivers of phenotypical change in humans, namely, torture and enclosures (e.g., walls of early states), but misinterprets their true impact. Nietzsche believes that these technologies are responsible for producing what I call “culture-serving memory” and the bad conscience by causing emotions that once were expressed outwardly to turn inward causing the “psychological digestion” of the human animal. In reality, however, these mechanisms are conducive to breeding a particular type of individual, namely, one who is docile, by introducing artificial and unconscious selective pressures into the environment of early humans. In showing that Nietzsche’s genealogical account of memory and bad conscience is not underpinned on a false scientific theory and is consistent with Neo-Darwinism, I deflect a potentially fatal blow regarding the veracity of Nietzsche’s genealogies.
Our article identifies and describes the metaphoric fallacy to a deductive inference (MFDI) that is an example of incorrect reasoning along the lines of the false analogy fallacy. The MFDI proceeds from informal semantical (metaphorical) claims to a supposedly formally deductive and necessary inference. We charge that such an inference is invalid. We provide three examples of the MFDI to demonstrate the structure of this invalid form of reasoning. Our goal is to contribute to the set of known informal fallacies.Resumé: Notre article identifie et dé-crit l'illusion métaphorique à une inférence par déduction (MFDI) qui est un exemple de raisonnement incorrect le long des lignes de l'illusion d'analogie fausse. Le MFDI provient des revendications (métaphoriques) séman-tiques informelles à une inférence par supposition officiellement par déduc-tion et nécessaire. Nous chargeons qu'une telle inférence est sans fondement. Nous fournissons trois exemples du MFDI pour démontrer la structure de cette forme sans fondement de raisonnement. Notre but est de contribuer à l'ensemble des illusions informelles connues.
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