ABSTRACT
A different way of elaborating this line of thought is to recognize that the liberal project of doing away with frameworks goes together with a certain conception of science as the only authoritative source of knowledge in our societies. The two views go along well as science may be conceived of as having privileged access to reality in isolation from human non-specialized sources of interest and significance in life. In this perspective, the scientific source of interest and attention to life exhausts the cognitive interest for life, thus leaving to the separate enterprise of political and ethical theory its specific, once again specialized, concern for principles of conduct. In this manner, a specialized understanding of ethics/politics goes along with an understanding of science as the privileged source of access to the world. The chapter argues that science should be conceived of instead as a specialized activity dedicated to knowing how things are in determinate and specific ways, whereas ethical and political thought may become specialized but, as such, is not a specialized activity at the pain of detaching ethics and politics from the mobile sources of interest for, and attachment to, life.
In order to argue this, we need in the first place to be able to consider science as a certain specialized activity, that is, we need to argue against the view according to which science reaches reality from a point of view above humanity. This line of argument can be found in pragmatism, for example, Putnam, as well as in some lines of Wittgensteinian philosophy, such as McDowell, but here Foucault will be privileged as coherent with these latter views albeit distinctive and fruitful. Foucault shows in fact that the conception of science as the way in which reality per se is revealed independently from ways of training the self is congenial to how theology has thought about itself and has, as such, contributed to canceling the ancient conception according to which reality unfolds together with a certain way of cultivating and educating the self. The conclusion of this argument is that of thinking of both science and human thought at large as human activities involved with training and education but in selecting science as a specialized activity instrumental in specific goals and interests, thus allowing room for a different unspecialized activity of thought and deliberation.
