60 ideas
| 7500 | Early Greeks cared about city and companions; later Greeks concentrated on the self [Foucault] |
| 15045 | The big issue since the eighteenth century has been: what is Reason? Its effect, limits and dangers? [Foucault] |
| 7426 | Critical philosophy is what questions domination at every level [Foucault] |
| 7423 | Philosophy and politics are fundamentally linked [Foucault] |
| 15038 | Structuralism systematically abstracted the event from sciences, and even from history [Foucault] |
| 7420 | When logos controls our desires, we have actually become the logos [Foucault] |
| 21945 | Foucault originally felt that liberating reason had become an instrument of domination [Foucault, by Gutting] |
| 15044 | 'Truth' is the procedures for controlling which statements are acceptable [Foucault] |
| 15042 | Truth doesn't arise from solitary freedom, but from societies with constraints [Foucault] |
| 15037 | Why does knowledge appear in sudden bursts, and not in a smooth continuous development? [Foucault] |
| 21942 | Foucault challenges knowledge in psychology and sociology, not in the basic sciences [Foucault, by Gutting] |
| 7424 | Saying games of truth were merely power relations would be a horrible exaggeration [Foucault] |
| 21941 | Unlike Marxists, Foucault explains thought internally, without deference to conscious ideas [Foucault, by Gutting] |
| 7422 | A subject is a form which can change, in (say) political or sexual situations [Foucault] |
| 22235 | Feelings are not unchanging, but have a history (especially if they are noble) [Foucault] |
| 23590 | Criminal responsibility can be fully assigned to each member of a group [Walzer] |
| 23578 | Double Effect needs a double intention - to achieve the good, and minimise the evil [Walzer] |
| 21939 | The author function of any text is a plurality of selves [Foucault, by Gutting] |
| 7419 | Ethics is the conscious practice of freedom [Foucault] |
| 23564 | Deep ethical theory is very controversial, but we have to live with higher ethical practice [Walzer] |
| 7501 | Why couldn't a person's life become a work of art? [Foucault] |
| 7498 | Greeks and early Christians were much more concerned about food than about sex [Foucault] |
| 21940 | Nature is not the basis of rights, but the willingness to risk death in asserting them [Foucault] |
| 20595 | You can't distribute goods from behind a veil, because their social meaning is unclear [Walzer, by Tuckness/Wolf] |
| 15043 | Every society has a politics of truth, concerning its values, functions, prestige and mechanisms [Foucault] |
| 15040 | Marxists denounced power as class domination, but never analysed its mechanics [Foucault] |
| 15041 | Power doesn't just repress, but entices us with pleasure, artefacts, knowledge and discourse [Foucault] |
| 8991 | Foucault can't accept that power is sometimes decent and benign [Foucault, by Scruton] |
| 7425 | The aim is not to eliminate power relations, but to reduce domination [Foucault] |
| 22236 | The big question of the Renaissance was how to govern everything, from the state to children [Foucault] |
| 21947 | Power is localised, so we either have totalitarian centralisation, or local politics [Foucault, by Gutting] |
| 21946 | Prisons gradually became our models for schools, hospitals and factories [Foucault, by Gutting] |
| 7418 | The idea of liberation suggests there is a human nature which has been repressed [Foucault] |
| 20592 | Complex equality restricts equalities from spilling over, like money influencing politics and law [Walzer, by Tuckness/Wolf] |
| 20549 | Equality is complex, with different spheres of equality where different principles apply [Walzer, by Swift] |
| 23568 | If whole states possess rights, there can be social relations between states [Walzer] |
| 21116 | Power is used to create identities and ways of life for other people [Foucault, by Shorten] |
| 23571 | States can rightly pre-empt real and serious threats [Walzer] |
| 23572 | Just wars are self-defence, or a rightful intercession in another's troubles [Walzer] |
| 23581 | The aim of reprisals is to enforce the rules of war [Walzer] |
| 23582 | Reprisal is defensible, as an alternative to war [Walzer] |
| 23588 | With nuclear weapons we have a permanent supreme emergency (which is unstable) [Walzer] |
| 23580 | States need not endure attacks passively, and successful reprisals are legitimate [Walzer] |
| 23587 | Nuclear bombs are not for normal war; they undermine the 'just war', with a new morality [Walzer] |
| 23567 | Even non-violent intrusive acts between states count as aggression, if they justify resistance [Walzer] |
| 23570 | The only good reason for fighting is in defence of rights [Walzer] |
| 23573 | For moral reasons, a just war must be a limited war [Walzer] |
| 23577 | Napoleon said 'I don't care about the deaths of a million men' [Walzer] |
| 23593 | Jus ad bellum and Jus in bello are independent; unjust wars can be fought in a just way [Walzer] |
| 23574 | The duties and moral status of loyal and obedient soldiers is the same in defence and aggression [Walzer] |
| 23575 | We can't blame soldiers for anything they do which clearly promotes victory [Walzer] |
| 23584 | Rejecting Combatant Equality allows just soldiers to be harsher, even to the extreme [Walzer] |
| 23589 | Kidnapped sailors and volunteers have different obligations to the passengers [Walzer] |
| 23614 | Even aggressor soldiers are not criminals, so they have equal rights with their opponents [Walzer] |
| 23586 | What matters in war is unacceptable targets, not unacceptable weapons [Walzer] |
| 23591 | If the oppressor is cruel, nonviolence is either surrender, or a mere gesture [Walzer] |
| 23579 | Soldiers will only protect civilians if they feel safe from them [Walzer] |
| 23592 | We can only lead war towards peace if we firmly enforce the rules of war [Walzer] |
| 15039 | History lacks 'meaning', but it can be analysed in terms of its struggles [Foucault] |
| 6005 | Animals are dangerous and nourishing, and can't form contracts of justice [Hermarchus, by Sedley] |