Will to Know Lectures - 16 Dec. 1970 & 6 Jan. 1971

First we aired out our questions:

• 26 - Is the Kantian dilemma the same as the transcendental-empirical?
• 24-25 - How is truth different from knowledge?
• 27 - What does Foucault mean by Nietzsche's "positivism"?
• What is the relationship between the Kantian dilemma and sophism?
• 38 - What is Aristotle excluding in order to make philosophical knowledge possible?
• 31-32 - What does it mean to say that "truth...is in principle linked to knowledge, but both exist in a relation to each other of both support and exclusion"?
• 27 - Why does Foucault want to kill Spinoza?

Then worked through discussion:

• Spinoza seems to ground the quest for truth in the pursuit of happiness; for Aristotle, the quest for truth is simply the result of an innate desire.  Both, Foucault seems to be arguing, are idealists, and therefore must be surpassed.
• Foucault seems to be excavating from both Aristotle and Spinoza the notion that knowledge is worth pursuing because it makes us happy.
• For Nietzsche, the desire for knowledge is simply one configuration that desire might take.
• Foucault talking about positivism in terms of Comte, most likely.  Idea is that one can't assert anything without grounding it in empirics.  Nietzsche, in Human, All Too Human, appears to be a positivist - Foucault is suggesting that Nietzsche has a positivist theme (but it needn't be overcome).
• Foucault suggests that the Sophist is "outside," in the history of philosophy.  Meaning, possibly, that the Sophist rejects the identification of truth and knowledge.
• Aristotle accuses the sophists of excluding truth from debate, but Foucault is suggesting that Aristotle himself is attempting to exclude sophistical reasoning from debate.