Heidegger and the history of thought by Michel Foucault

• Grant number: 24/03741-6
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: August 01, 2024
• End date: July 31, 2028
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy - History of Philosophy
• Principal Investigator: Pedro Paulo Garrido Pimenta
• Grantee: Rodrigo de Oliveira Figueiredo
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This doctoral research aims to investigate Heidegger's role in the constitution of Michel Foucault's "history of thought". Initially, I use the readings made by José Arthur Giannotti and Benedito Nunes on this relationship. According to them, in the same vein as Heidegger, for whom the unveiling of truth occurs before truth as enunciation, Foucault sees thought as informed by an exteriority, by a truth that is prior to proposition - whether this truth is called episteme or practices. By reading together selected moments from The Order of Things, the second volume of the History of Sexuality and courses given by Foucault in the 1980s, the first objective of the thesis will be to investigate to what extent this reading can be fruitful for understanding Michel Foucault's thought. With regard to Heidegger, the texts prioritized will initially be the lecture On the Essence of Truth and the Letter on Humanism.Secondly, I will try to show how, at the same time as using Heidegger to think about the relationship between subjectivity and truth, Foucault tried to distance himself from the formulations of Heideggerian thought on being and technique, in an effort to think about the "techniques of the self" through the lens of the constitution of forms of subjectivation. To this end, I intend to analyze two main points: 1) the way in which Foucault presents his final research as a study of the ways in which being was taken as something that could and should be thought; 2) the meaning of his retrospective presentation of his philosophical work as a "critical work of thought on thought itself". Finally, I want to outline my own interpretation of Foucault's philosophical enterprise. I intend to show the meaning of the way he articulates, in his later years, the notions of "ontology" and "present" to characterize his history of thought. According to Foucault, the "ontology of ourselves" would seek to think about what we are today through an analysis of the relationship between thought and practice in the West. In this sense, the outlining of this history of thought will be thought of as motivated by the following problem: could the exercise of thinking about history itself open up space for other ways of thinking - that is, for other ways of being?