According to J. Bouveresse, Foucauldi's definition of the critical history of thought as the "emergence of truth games" neutralizes the Fregean distinction between being-true and being-held-true, by reducing the former to the latter. After recalling Frege's theses on the Third Domain, we focused on Foucauldi's notion of alethurgy as the manifestation / production of truth, and on the ambiguity of the term "produce" (a thing / a testimony). We then evoked the theses of the Rio de Janeiro conferences on Truth and Legal Forms (May 1973): the transition from (medieval) judicial ordeal to inquiry, the distinction between (apophantic) "operator of law" and "operator of truth", and emphasized that the question of the subject of action as Wer-Frage (question WHO?) extended Aristotle's apophantic operation into the judicial order. The opposition between Foucauldian relativism and Aristotelian realism outlined by J. Bouveresse was then taken up. Foucault's thesis on truth (noted here as TF/TF*) can be analyzed as TF: it is not because the saying of the saying-true is true that the saying-true can be said to be "true"; it is because the saying-true is true that its saying can be said to be "true" and TF*: truth is not the cause, but the effect of knowledge. According to Bouveresse, TF is directly opposed to Aristotle, Metaphysics, Θ 10, 1051b7-10 ("It is not because we think in a true way that you are white, that you are white, but it is because you are white, that in saying that you are, we are in the truth"). The same criticism can be made on the basis of Γ 7, 1011b 26. This is what Bouveresse does, sketching a comparison between Foucault and Hacking. It should be noted, however, that much here depends on translations. As we have shown, the translations of Kirwan and Ross used by Hacking do not say the same thing as Tricot's, nor as B. Cassin and M. Narcy's in La décision du sens, traduction et commentaire de Métaphysique, Γ. According to Hacking, Aristotle and Austin agree on two points: "They talk about what is said, and they talk about the adjective 'true'". For Bouveresse, this is not the case with Foucault: the latter speaks "most of the time of the expression 'say-true', considered as a whole and in which 'true' doesn't really function as an adjective, but rather as a kind of adverb". It was noted that, in these terms, Foucault seemed to support an adverbial theory of truth of the kind presented in our 2015 seminar on Psychic Functions. We concluded by pointing out that the confusion between being-true and holding-for-true imputed to Foucault via Frege opened onto the medieval problematic of assent(assensus).
The second hour addressed the banishment of the Sophist. According to Foucault (lesson of January 6, 1971), the main actor was not Plato, but Aristotle. Plato "liquidated" the Sophists, their philosophy and their purely "chrematistic" "rule of life", geared to success and gain. Aristotle preserved the sophisms, which he included in order to better master them. Foucault says little about the fate of sophistry after Aristotle. He mentions medieval Insolubilia and sophismata in a few lines, relying mainly on William and Martha Kneale's The Development of Logic (1962). He ignores works on the history of medieval logic, which took off in the 1960s and 1970s in the Netherlands (L.M. De Rijk), Denmark (J. Pinborg, S. Ebbesen), the USA (N. Kretzmann) and Italy (A. Maierù). He is exclusively interested in the opposition between apophantic operation and sophistic or "eristic" operation (from the Greek ἔρις, "dispute"). The lecture of January 13, 1971 defines the apophantic operation as the "ceaselessly renewed gesture by which the relation of an utterance to reality, to being, to truth is unraveled at the level of the enunciative event and deferred to what is said in the utterance and to the relation between what is said and the things themselves". This formula is an extended version of the event that occurred "between Hesiod and Plato": the displacement of truth from the act of enunciation to the utterance itself. The pages Foucault devotes to the two-stage liquidation of the sophist and sophistry show his clear awareness of the requirements of what Bouveresse calls "realism". The domination exerted over the Sophist character in Plato's dialogue of the same name has a double point of support: 1) "the assertion that truth is reached in a discussion we have with ourselves in our own minds"; 2) the assertion, linked to the previous one, that "to say false is to say that what is is not" (Sophist 263D). It is these two assertions that we find displaced and internalized in Aristotle, in the Metaphysics, Γ [7], "when he defines the true statement by the fact of saying that what is is and that what is not is not", and in the Second Analytics, "when he says that syllogism and demonstration have to do not with external discourse but with that which is held in the soul" (I, 10, 76b24-27). We concluded the session by pointing out the four phenomena that Foucault said "gave foundation to Western science and philosophy in their historical development": 1) "the exclusion of the materiality of discourse", 2) "the emergence of an apophantic giving the conditions under which a proposition can be true or false", 3) "the sovereignty of the signifier-signified relationship", 4) "the privilege accorded to thought as the locus of the appearance of truth".
