"Not a single person can understand me, could it be something I did wrong?
No, it's every single person on Earth who is wrong."
No, it's every single person on Earth who is wrong."
Supposedly Hegel's last words really were some kind of woeful lament about how no one had ever understood him. Since he's died, and indeed during his life, many philosophers have complained about his obscurism, and even accused him of intentionally writing badly to prevent people from understanding him. While some people, such as Hegel, believed his ideas are just that intrinsicly difficulty to understand, there are others, such as everyone else, who thought he probably could have done a better job explaining them.
"But you don't understand, they will be happy in the end to be subjugated completely to my will."
The Panopticon was a design for a prison by Jeremy Bentham, which he not only proposed, but was rather obsessed by. He worked for years trying to secure government funding to construct one, which he felt would given his theories about rehabilitative penal systems empirical grounding. The main idea is that the very architecture of the prison would be designed around total surveillance of the prisoners, as each cell would be clearly visible by a central viewing station. His main selling point to the government was that this would save money, since only one guard could watch the entire population, or even no guards, since it was designed in such a way that the prisoners could never quite tell if someone was in the tower watching them or not. He also had ideas about using prolonged periods of solitary confinement, which we now know to be totally inhumane, to sort of "wipe clean" the minds of the prisoners before entering the prison. In addition he also thought forcing them to do menial labor tasks, like spinning looming wheels to "teach them the value of honest work". (again he pitched this to the government as a cost savings, since it would generate income). Some would consider it slavery.
The concept of the panopticon, as a sort of metaphor for society at large, became popular when Michel Foucault criticized it as a kind of evolution of society towards more and more control and domination, rather than a liberal reform away from more brutal forms of punishment. He thought that instead of more direct punishments, like flogging, which only punish the body, the panopticon seeks total domination of the subject's mind, in an attempt to create a passive, productive, working body. The prison was only the most direct and obvious kind of archetype of the panopticon, but Foucault thought that in reality people like Bentham created a system that sought far reaching control and surveillance over every aspect of life.
The concept of the panopticon, as a sort of metaphor for society at large, became popular when Michel Foucault criticized it as a kind of evolution of society towards more and more control and domination, rather than a liberal reform away from more brutal forms of punishment. He thought that instead of more direct punishments, like flogging, which only punish the body, the panopticon seeks total domination of the subject's mind, in an attempt to create a passive, productive, working body. The prison was only the most direct and obvious kind of archetype of the panopticon, but Foucault thought that in reality people like Bentham created a system that sought far reaching control and surveillance over every aspect of life.
I know this is the sixth or seventh comic that Aristotle has appeared in with a cowboy hat, but this is no the canonical explanation for how he got it. These comics are all chronically out of order, it turns out, or something like that.
Donna Harroway is a feminist philosopher, who wrote "A Cyborg Manifesto", an essay which uses the metaphor of a cyborg thought experiment to critique traditional feminist "identity politics". She asks us to imagine a cyborg, neither machine or human, genderless, raceless, and without parents. Completely unrooted in historical social groups and tradition, the cyborg society is able to transcend our common politics of groups advocating for the goals of members which belong to any given identity. The Cyborg has no concrete identity.
So, rather than feminism advocating on behalf of "women", which is a set containing a group of individuals with that identity, it is a loose coalition of people with a certain affinities. Like the cyborg, no human being is merely one thing such as a "woman", a "worker", or a "black person". We are an amalgamation of multiple things, many of which are socially constructed or even freely chosen by our creative will, and she thought a politics of the future must reflect our "cyborg" nature.
Thomas Hobbes is best known for believing that we had to submit to a kind of social contract and obey the monarch in order to form society. Edmond Burke was a 17th century conservative thinker who believe we should only change society in small steps. Aristotle represents kind of the polar opposite to something like the Cyborg Manifesto, where he thought everything had an essential essence that represented its ideal form.
So, rather than feminism advocating on behalf of "women", which is a set containing a group of individuals with that identity, it is a loose coalition of people with a certain affinities. Like the cyborg, no human being is merely one thing such as a "woman", a "worker", or a "black person". We are an amalgamation of multiple things, many of which are socially constructed or even freely chosen by our creative will, and she thought a politics of the future must reflect our "cyborg" nature.
Thomas Hobbes is best known for believing that we had to submit to a kind of social contract and obey the monarch in order to form society. Edmond Burke was a 17th century conservative thinker who believe we should only change society in small steps. Aristotle represents kind of the polar opposite to something like the Cyborg Manifesto, where he thought everything had an essential essence that represented its ideal form.