Although critique is frequently understood as fault finding and negative judgment,[1] it can also involve merit recognition, and in the philosophical tradition it also means a methodical practice of doubt.
This has been extended in modern philosophy to mean a systematic inquiry into the conditions and consequences of a concept, a theory, a discipline, or an approach and/or attempt to understand the limitations and validity of that.
The idea of critique is elemental to legal, aesthetic, and literary theory and such practices, such as in the analysis and evaluation of writings such as pictorial, musical, or expanded textual works.
[6] This analysis then offers by way of the critique method either a rebuttal or a suggestion of further expansion upon the problems presented by the topic of that specific written or oral argumentation.
[10] In their different and radically contrasting ways, MacIntyre and Foucault go well beyond the original Kantian meaning of the term critique in contesting legitimatory accounts of social power.