Human Sciences All books
Roger-Pol Droit
Michel Foucault, interviews
On 25 June 1984, Michel Foucault died of AIDS-related complications at a hospital in Paris. Since then, his reputation and influence - already great during his lifetime - have not ceased to grow. Whether his subject was asylums, prisons or the history of sexuality, Foucault always tried to understand the organising forces behind prevalent social attitudes, by which a society defines itself, so as to disrupt the existing order. A philosopher as well as a historian, Foucault was an unclassifiable, unpredictable, subversive thinker, and the inventor of a new style of intellectual investigation. He rarely spoke of himself, or of his goals, or of his relations to his own writing, experiences and intellectual development. He did, however, talk about himself in a series of interviews that he gave me in June 1975, a few weeks after the publication of Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Wishing to pay homage to his memory, I have gathered here three of those interviews, which were previously published in the press, along with some of my memories and thoughts about him, writes Roger-Pol Droit. Roger-Pol Droit is a research fellow in philosophy at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and a columnist for the French daily newspaper Le Monde. He is the author of La Compagnie des philosophes, La Compagnie des contemporains, 101 Expériences de philosophie quotidienne and Dernières nouvelles des choses.
Roger-Pol Droit
Living Today With Socrates, Epicurus, Seneca and All the Others
What have we lost by forgetting the teachings of Antiquity? And what can we find out for our own time by rediscovering the Classics?
Roger-Pol Droit
The Company of Philosophers
Roger-Pol Droit takes the reader on a voyage through time, spanning the centuries from Antiquity to the present, in a series of intellectual portraits of great and usual or remarkable thinkers, beginning with Socrates and Plato and ending with Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. A major part of this volume is devoted to modern philosophers, from Kant to Heidegger. The author's goal is to stimulate new thought and to bring to life for the reader the vital ideas of past thinkers.
Roger-Pol Droit
The Company of Contemporaries
In this book, Droit reviews the works of some major contemporary thinkers: Bourdieu, Foucault, Girard, Habermas, Lévi-Strauss, Serres, and Vernant, among others. The interviews included here allow the reader to encounter biologists and sociologists, as well as anthropologists and psychoanalysts. Philosophers are well represented, but all the humanities have been included, and practically all major contemporary issues are considered, from bio-ethics to the end of history, from the construction of Europe to the rise of violence, from globalisation to the environment, from the development of science to political and religious extremism. Roger-Pol Droit is a philosopher and researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.
Roger-Pol Droit, Dan Sperber
Ideas on the Way
What ideas can we expect to see develop in the coming years? And how will they modify our conceptions of thought? What impact will they have on our personal existence, our daily reality, our rules for life? Will the intellectual models that are now emerging soon be influencing policy decisions? At a moment as symbolic as the beginning of a new millenium, we wanted to bring together the elements of thought which permit us to better respond to these questions." Roger-Pol Droit and Dan Sperber Both authors work at the Centre National de Rècherche Scientifique.