Michel Foucault's parrhesia and the question of ethics

This dissertation is based on Foucault's unpublished seminar: "Discourse and Truth: The Problematization of Parrhesia," presented in a series of lectures at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1983.;The notion of parrhesia can be summarized in the following quotation from the seminar:;Parrhesia is a kind of verbal activity where the speaker has a specific relation to truth through danger, a certain type of relation to himself or other people through criticism (self-criticism or criticism of other people), and a specific relation to moral law through freedom and duty (pp. 7-8).;Chapter I poses a general view of the seminar. It lays out the content and key issues Foucault uses in the seminar. The term parrhesia is elaborated in terms of its basic meanings as well as its historical usages.;Chapter II presents parrhesia in its relation to truth. It argues that parrhesia actually entails a certain understanding of truth. This necessarily leads to Foucault's notion of power. The chapter mainly focuses on power as understood in Foucault's early works.;Chapter III lays out the answers to questions such as: Who is entitled to the activity of parrhesia? What are the conditions for being a parrhesia? The ethical notion becomes crucial at this point. The chapter also elaborates on Foucault's specific stance on the role of the intellectual.;Chapter IV explores the relation between parrhesia and the practice of taking care of oneself as discussed in the last part of the seminar. Here we examine the relation between "self" and "truth," parrhesia and communication, and parrhesia as related to the care for others.;Finally, we conclude that Foucault's entire philosophical thinking may be regarded as an ethics of thought. Through his "problematization," Foucault brings ethics into question. The problematization of parrhesia is, therefore, a question of ethics.