In 1980, Michel Foucault's work makes two decisive turns. On the one hand, as announced at the start of his course at the Collège de France for that year, Le Gouvernement des vivants, his topic will be the modalities through which power constitutes itself in relation to truth. On the other, the texts on which he will concentrate will no longer be those of the early modern period. Rather, he begins with one by Dio Cassius on the emperor Septimius Severus and then proceeds to spend the next two sessions offering a reading of Oedipus Tyrannus. He will concentrate on works from antiquity for the rest of his life. This book will offer the first detailed account of these lectures, examining both the development of their philosophical argument and the ancient texts on which that argument is based. This is the period during which Foucault also began work on Volumes 2 and 3 of the History of Sexuality. Yet, while there are clear overlaps between the work he was presenting in his course and the last books he published before his death, nonetheless the seminars are anything but rough drafts for the published work. Instead they offer a sustained encounter with the texts of the classical and early Christian era while seeking to trace a genealogy of the western subject as a speaker of truth.

"In 1980, Michel Foucault's work makes two decisive turns. On the one hand, as announced at the start of his course at the Collège de France for that year, Le Gouvernement des vivants , his topic will be the modalities through which power constitutes itself in relation to truth. On the other hand, the texts on which he will concentrate will no longer be those of the early modern period. Rather, he begins with one by Dio Cassius on the emperor Septimius Severus and then proceeds to spend the next two sessions offering a reading of Oedipus Tyrannus . He will concentrate on works from antiquity for the rest of his life. This book will offer the first detailed account of these lectures, examining both the development of their philosophical argument and the ancient texts on which that argument is based. This is the period during which Foucault also began work on Volumes 2 and 3 of the History of Sexuality . Yet, while there are clear overlaps between the work he was presenting in his course and the last books he published before his death, nonetheless the seminars are anything but rough drafts for the published work. Instead they offer a sustained encounter with the texts of the classical and early Christian era while seeking to trace a genealogy of the western subject as a speaker of truth."--

The first full treatment of truth as a core philosophical concept in the late Foucault, this volume examines his work on the ancient world and the early church. Each essay features a deep examination as to how the topics of truth and sexuality intersect with and focus on Foucault's engagement with ancient philosophy and thought. Truth in the Late Foucault offers readings on Plato, Artemidorus, Cicero, Sophocles and the Stoics, and pays close attention to Cassian, Paulinus of Nola, and early Christian practices of confession. With the publication of the long-awaited volume 4 of the History of Sexuality: Confessions of the Flesh, the shape of the final Foucault is now brought into stark relief. As well as looking at ancient thought, the contributors explore Foucault's work in relation to philosophers such as Gadamer, Heidegger, Derrida and Descartes. Foucault's long-running and often contentious dialogue with psychoanalysis, on the relation between truth and the subject, is also examined. Each essay not only makes an important statement, but also is part of an interconnected arc of topics and understanding, covering both the ancient and modern periods. This book reveals that Foucault's concern with antiquity raises questions deeply pertinent to the present moment.

This 2005 book is a critical examination of Michel Foucault's relation to ancient Greek thought, in particular his famous analysis of Greek history of sexuality. Wolfgang Detel offers an understanding of Foucault's theories of power and knowledge based on modern analytical theories of science and concepts of power. He offers a complex reading of the texts which Foucault discusses, covering topics such as Aristotle's ethics and theory of sex, Hippocratic dietetics, the earliest treatises on economics, and Plato's theory of love. The result is a philosophically rich and probing critique of Foucault's later writings, and a persuasive account of the relation between ethics, power and knowledge in classical antiquity. His book will have a wide appeal to readers interested in Foucault and in Greek thought and culture.

This volume, published for the first time in English, takes an interdisciplinary approach to exploring how the work of Michel Foucault has influenced studies of Ancient Greece and Rome. Of interest to students and scholars in classical studies, philosophy, gender studies, and ancient history.

The Courage of the Truth is the last course that Michel Foucault delivered at the College de France before his death in 1984. In this course, he continues the theme of the previous year's lectures in exploring the notion of "truth-telling" in politics to establish a number of ethically irreducible conditionsbased on courage and conviction.

The affinities between Pierre Hadot’s and Michel Foucault’s interpretations of ancient philosophy, as well as their impact, are well-known. However, these interpretations have been criticized in several crucial points. This book provides the first extensive critical assessment of these interpretations. It brings together specialists in ancient philosophy, as well as Hadot and Foucault scholars, in order both to explore criticisms and clarify Hadot’s and Foucault’s accounts. In doing so, it not only offers an overview of the main trends in Philosophy as a Way of Life, but also recasts the debate and opens new paths of inquiry in the field.

On 26 August 1974, Michel Foucault completed work on Discipline and Punish, and on that very same day began writing the first volume of The History of Sexuality. A little under ten years later, on 25 June 1984, shortly after the second and third volumes were published, he was dead. This decade is one of the most fascinating of his career. It begins with the initiation of the sexuality project, and ends with its enforced and premature closure. Yet in 1974 he had something very different in mind for The History of Sexuality than the way things were left in 1984. Foucault originally planned a thematically organised series of six volumes, but wrote little of what he promised and published none of them. Instead over the course of the next decade he took his work in very different directions, studying, lecturing and writing about historical periods stretching back to antiquity. This book offers a detailed intellectual history of both the abandoned thematic project and the more properly historical version left incomplete at his death. It draws on all Foucault’s writings in this period, his courses at the Collège de France and lectures elsewhere, as well as material archived in France and California to provide a comprehensive overview and synthetic account of Foucault’s last decade.

"Speaking the Truth about Oneself is composed of lectures that acclaimed French philosopher Michel Foucault delivered in 1982 at the University of Toronto. As is characteristic of his later work, he is concerned here with the care and cultivation of the self, which becomes the central theme of the second and third volumes of his famous History of Sexuality, published in French in 1984, the month of his death, and which are explored here in a striking and typically illuminating fashion. Throughout his career, Foucault had always been interested in the question of how constellations of knowledge and power produce and constitute subjects. But in the last phase of his life, he became especially interested not only in how subjects are constituted by outside forces but in how they constitute themselves. In this lecture series and accompanying seminar, we find Foucault focused on antiquity, starting with classical Greece, the early Roman dynasties, and concluding with fourth- and fifth-century Christian monasticism. Foucault's claim is that, in these periods, we see the development of a new kind of act-"speaking the truth" (about oneself)-as the locus of a new form of subjectivity, which he deemed important not just for historical reasons but also as something modernity could harness anew or adapt to its own purposes"--

This volume is the first to address Foucault's influence and the potential of his work in the understanding and the writing of history. It does so critically and accessibly. Scholars from the United States, France and Italy, including historians, sociologists, an anthropogist and a philosopher, range over Foucault's writing - on love and the family in classical antiquity, the constitution of the self, the history of science and sexuality, to the origins of the liberal state. But, true to its subject, this book does not conceive of history divorced from philosophy: it explores how Foucault's understanding of the past relates to his ideas of truth, ethics, knowledge and action. All-in-all, the book offers a series of mind-opening perspectives on Foucault's work, on the past, and on the present.