ABSTRACT
Freedom is one of the most intractable philosophical problems in the Western philosophical tradition. The history of ethics, without question, has been determined by how freedom has been defined. Genealogy is a technique of analysis that renders what we took to be natural, ontologically stable, historically immutable into something that is historically contingent, produced, mutable and thus open to transformation, revision, abandonment and challenge. Socrates is undoubtedly one of the most important figures in the Western philosophical canon. For Foucault, Augustine occupies a pivotal role in the transformation of the technologies of the self from late antiquity to the medieval and early modern periods. Criticism entails that instead of searching for invariant and transcendental structures that may apply to and hold the same value and significance for all humanity, we set out in a historical investigation into the processes and events that have led to the constitution of our way of being.
