1st. Session: handout and list of texts

First Meeting: Ancient Philosophy

Overview:

Starting Point: The Experience of Poverty in Contemporary Post-Industrial West

            Foucault on Experience – Quote HS2

                        Relations of Power/governmentality

                        Discursive Formations

                        Practices of the Self, Forms of Subjectivation/Subjection

           

            Contemporary Poverty – A Social Problem

                        Statistical Measurement

                        Technical Interventions/Solutions to the “Problem”

Contemporary Philosophy plays its role – poverty as an object to be known, a problem to be solved: 1) Ethics – what is our personal duty to the poor; 2) Political Philosophy – what obligations does society have to its poor; 3) Critical Theory – obligation to revolt in the name of the poor/excluded

Genealogical Analysis shows that what is so ‘familiar’, ‘obvious’, even natural to us is historically singular and anything but natural or obvious
            
            A Genealogy of Poverty itself reveals some of the transformations in the experience of poverty

Philosophy Now and Then: Care of the Self, Arts of Existence, Parrhesia, Spirituality

Three Forms of Philosophy as a way of life and the Philosophy as a Practice of the Self

            Socrates – Poverty as Verification of Truth

            Stoicism – Poverty as a Virtual State and a Form of Testing/training

Cynicism – Poverty as a Real State and a radical, ongoing modification of Life/Subjectivity, A Positive Goal to Be Attained

Aristotle… is interesting because (1) challenges poverty as “verification of truth,” as “a virtual state of testing,” and as “a positive goal to be attained;” (2) adds the political (collective/communal) dimension of poverty under the notion of justice and (3) some of his notions will have a future in the constitution of the experience of poverty

List of Texts

1. Aristotle. Excerpts from Nichomachean Ethics and Politics (read them all)

2. Diogenes Laertius. VI, Diogenes (numbers 29, 37, 41, 61, 46), Crates (87)

3. Foucault, Michel. The Courage of the Truth (we recommend reading the whole lecture, but pages 256-261 are the ones explicitly related to poverty)

4.  _______________. The Hermeneutics of the Subject (we recommend reading the whole lecture, but pages 428-430 are the ones explicitly related to poverty)

5. McGushin, Edward. Towards a Genealogy of Poverty (read it all)

6. Plato. Apology (the most relevant sections are the following: 23b, 29d-e, 30a-b, 31a-c, 33b, 36b)

7. ______. Symposium (we recommend reading the whole section scanned, but those explicitly related to poverty are sections 202E to 204D)

8. Seneca, letter 18 (read it all)