Publication Details

Abstract

The paper invites to rethink Michel Foucault’s last course at Collège de France significantly entitled Le courage de la verity, which can be read as a philosophical statement (re)defining and embodying at the same time the idea of philosophy and its “epistemological”, political and ethical perimeters by proposing a reflection on the risks and the duties involved in the tasks of thinking and publicly sharing thoughts. While he seems to reconsider and readjust his own pedagogical and philosophical methodologies, Michel Foucault looks back at the history of philosophy, and notably to its ancient Greek roots, to emphasize some of the crucial turning points, at which a new and different ethos related to the task of telling the truth demands a redefinition of philosophy, its goals, and even the idea of metaphysics. Seeing the ideal as embodied by Socrates and the cynics, Foucault leaves us with the image of philosophy as a statement in the first person, and a commitment to truth to be pursued regardless extreme consequences.