Master: Now, is Foucault’s work the content you’re looking for, or merely a pointer.
Student: What… does that mean?
Master: Do you think that you think that the value of Foucault for you comes from the specific ideas he had, or in using him to even consider these two topics?
This put words to a feeling I’ve had a lot. Often I have some ideas, and use thinkers as a kind of handle to point to the ideas in my head (especially when I haven’t actually read the thinkers yet). The problem is that this fools me into thinking that the ideas are developed, either by me or by the thinkers. I like this idea of using the thinkers to notice topics, but then developing on the topics yourself, at least if the thinkers don’t take those topics in the direction you had in mind to take them.
On a different note, if you’re interested in Foucault’s methodology, some search terms would be “genealogy” and “conceptual engineering.” Here is a LW post on conceptual engineering, and here is a review of a recent book on the topic (which I believe engages with Foucault as well as Nietzsche, Hume, Bernard Williams, and maybe others; I haven’t actually read the full book yet, just this review). The book seems to be pretty directly about what you’re looking for: “history for finding out where our concepts and values come from, in order to question them.”
This put words to a feeling I’ve had a lot. Often I have some ideas, and use thinkers as a kind of handle to point to the ideas in my head (especially when I haven’t actually read the thinkers yet). The problem is that this fools me into thinking that the ideas are developed, either by me or by the thinkers. I like this idea of using the thinkers to notice topics, but then developing on the topics yourself, at least if the thinkers don’t take those topics in the direction you had in mind to take them.
On a different note, if you’re interested in Foucault’s methodology, some search terms would be “genealogy” and “conceptual engineering.” Here is a LW post on conceptual engineering, and here is a review of a recent book on the topic (which I believe engages with Foucault as well as Nietzsche, Hume, Bernard Williams, and maybe others; I haven’t actually read the full book yet, just this review). The book seems to be pretty directly about what you’re looking for: “history for finding out where our concepts and values come from, in order to question them.”
Glad that I managed to capture this feeling then!
And thanks for the reference! I know of conceptual engineering and genealogy, but didn’t know about the book. :)