Geneaology of critique: Truth-telling and the care of the self

In this thesis, we attempted to present that Foucault's project of the history of truth, which we call genealogy of critique, provides an opportunity to create a practice of non-normative critique, which is still related to truth, which is claimed to have lost the power to govern people today. To reveal such an opportunity, we have argued that the full formulation of Foucault's conception of critique, which guided all of his philosophical course, emerged in his recent work on ethics. To this end, we first discussed the concept of critique which Foucault presents as an alternative path from Kant and described as a practice of problematization. We traced the roots of this critique to the concept of parrhesia, a practice of truth-telling which had a very important role in ancient Greek culture, as a central theme in our thesis. As a result, we argued that a conception of truth that allows us to critically approach ourselves and our present can be found in a disregarded source in the history of thought, namely Cynicism. We can say that Cynicism offers a different perspective on thinking about the present function of truth by placing the direct relationship between life and truth at the basis of criticism, thus pointing to the possibility of establishing a true life, shaped as the expression of truth in this world.