Curso de filosofía : De Sócrates a Foucault

In 2001, an Argentine television production company approached Dardo Scavino with the task of writing the script for fourteen episodes of a series that would attempt to answer the question, "What is philosophy?" The author suggested refining the question and changing it to, "What does philosophy do?" The economic crisis hit, and the project was abandoned. A hundred pages of drafts remained, tucked away in a drawer. Forgotten, until, years later, Scavino decided to revisit them. This is the origin of this book, which translates that idea onto the page. Starting with the image of Chaerephon, Socrates' friend, traveling between Delphi and Athens, the fourteen chapters explain that philosophizing is not about developing grand theories about the divine and the human. Rather, the fundamental task of philosophy lies in listening to others to extract from their discourses the rules that govern them. Thus, from Socratic maieutics to Foucault's archaeology, the author traces the thought of Vico, Kant, Wollstonecraft, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein to explore the relationship between philosophy and language. In different ways, all these thinkers understood that these tacit norms constitute the true power of any human society. Their "psychagogy," as Plato calls it. Evoking scenes from literature and film, stories of philosophers, and personal anecdotes, this Philosophy Course aims to demonstrate why the discipline is not a science of objects, but of subjects subject to grammars that govern our ways of living and thinking. The result is a stimulating and insightful reflection on the meaning of philosophical thinking —which is neither preaching nor activism— and why it remains necessary today.