Michel Foucault's Fearless Speech deals with the idea of parrhesia and its role in ancient Greek philosophy and daily life. This lecture deals with two harmonious but separate definitions of parrhesia. One deals with parrhesia in a political sense, the act of speaking truth in a public arena with the aim of influencing powerful people at possible danger to oneself. The second discusses it as a Socratic, moral act, admitting truth even if it proves one wrong or damages one's self-image.
[...] Surely this film, dramatized though it may have been, contained more truth than the court system, given the conviction that was eventually handed down. A woman points the finger at the wrong man for her own reasons, corrupt police officers elect to protect a young local kid rather than a drifter, and Harris goes down the river. This addresses Foucault's first problem: the legal system, the American “process of reasoning,” completely failed to determine the truth, leaving a filmmaker to do it years later. [...]
[...] to see it substituting the particular for the general it means, tell me what the issue is, and I will tell you what the truth about the issue consists A driving force of Simon Blackburn's Truth: A Guide is separating those philosophers who strive to locate and define objective truth into two teams: the realists/absolutists, and the relativists/idealists. Put simply, the first category sees truth as objective, the other subjective. He takes issue with both sides of the spectrum. In between, Blackburn finds minimalism, a philosophy both he and Frege claim that “common sense and well-established science defends. [...]
[...] His analysis of the differences between locutionary, perlocutionary, and illocutionary speech illustrated that not all sentences can be evaluated for truth or falsity: rather, some exist to perform actions like naming, bequeathing, etc. Austin devotes much energy to reminding his readers not to separate sentences from their contexts. A sentence is just a sentence unless it is understood used by a certain person on a certain occasion when considered accordingly, the sentence becomes a statement. Statements have real meaning, then, and sentences do not. [...]
[...] This anecdote goes a long way towards summing up the movie and the way it was made: the fictionalization of the facts involved just go to show that the line between truth and falsehood is very thin, and easier to bend than most people might think. Michel Foucault saw two sides in the problematization of truth: how to determine if the process of determining truth is sound, and then, how to determine what the importance of knowing the truth and finding reliable truth-tellers to express it is to society and individuals. [...]
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