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Robert Nichols is Assistant Professor of Political Theory at the University of Minnesota.
About the author
Robert Nichols is Assistant Professor of Political Theory at the University of Minnesota.
Summary
This first systematic and comprehensive engagement of the relationship of Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault makes a unique contribution to our thinking about the question of freedom and shows why these major thinkers must be read in tandem if we want to fully understand twentieth-century Continental thought.
Additional text
"Robert Nichols' basic idea is an interesting one: viewing Foucaults 'care of the self' as a successful historicizing of Heidegger's existential analytic of care offers us a powerful alternative to the 'prevailing (Kantian) tradition['s problematic] model of freedom as autonomous rational willing.' . . . [He] provides clear and thoughtful reconstructions of Heidegger's and Foucault's attempts to develop a situational account of freedom, while engaging some other, in Nichols' view, less successful attempts by Herbert Marcuse and Axel Honneth to develop Heideggerian alternatives to the prevailing Kantian tradition . . . There is much to learn from Nichols' account of Foucault's historical ontology and how it leads us to a more politically helpful understanding of freedom. Similarly, many will be interested in how Nichols reads Foucault along with Heidegger, showing how each helps us to understand the other."
