Title: "Foucault, Rule-Following, and the Critique of Constitution" Time: Thursday, March 27th, 4-6pm Location: Philosophy Department Seminar Room (451 College Street, Room B-04).
Abstract:
Representations of rules are the vehicle of autonomy. As rational beings, we exercise freedom by following rules whose authority we accept. Assuming that concepts are, in part, defined by rules of inference, this task of rational self-governing extends from agency to understanding. Also concepts can be evaluated and revised, and by doing so we exercise autonomy on the domain of understanding. From this perspective, however, Wittgenstein’s rule-following considerations give rise to a new ethical problem, which I call ‘structural heteronomy’. According to a prominent line of interpretation, the regress of rules shows that both conceptual content and conceptual competence rest on rules that are implicit in reasoning as a social practice. As such, these rules escape rational control and constrain our freedom as concept-users by constituting, without our acceptance, limits of intelligibility for what we can think, imagine, and intend to do. By making explicit such rules, however, we bring their force to the purview of rational control and thus gain autonomy over our own understanding. I argue that this is the specific task of critique, in contrast to ideology critique and immanent critique, which unifies Foucault’s philosophical work as a sustained response to the problem of structural heteronomy.
