This paper presents a new interpretation of Michel Foucault’s critical project. It is well known that Foucault’s genealogical critique does not focus on issues of justification, but instead tackles “aspectival captivity,” that is, apparently inevitable limits of thought that constrain the agent’s freedom but that, in fact, can be transformed. However, it has not been recognized that, according to Foucault, critique can proceed along two distinct paths. In a key passage of “What Is Critique?,” Foucault states that critique is tasked (...) with questioning truth about its effects of power and with questioning power about its discourses of truth. We show that this “double movement” organizes Foucault’s critical project as a whole, giving it a significantly wider scope and a more complex structure than has been previously acknowledged. At the heart of the above-mentioned bifurcation lies an apparent tension between two contrastive roles Foucault assigns to truth-telling in the context of critique: on the one hand, truth-telling (as avowal) is a target of critique; on the other, truth-telling (as parrhesia) is one of critique’s methods. We argue that combining these two dimensions in a unified account is crucial for understanding and re-evaluating Foucault’s critical project as a whole. By showing that truth-telling remains an essential element of Foucauldian critique, this paper also rectifies some influential misinterpretations according to which Foucault’s critical project seeks to eliminate truth from the picture. (shrink)

In this paper I distinguish between two main critical questions: ‘how possible’ questions, which look for enabling conditions and raise issues of epistemic normativity; and ‘whether permissible’ questions, which relate to conditions of legitimacy and ethical normativity. I examine the interplay of both types of questions in Foucault’s work and argue that this helps us to understand both the function of the historical a priori in the archeological period and the subsequent accusations of crypto-normativity levelled against Foucault by commentators such (...) as Taylor and Habermas. I chart the complex conceptual space available for a defense. After examining several possible replies, I conclude that the most effective option, and the one that fits Foucault’s approach best, is to refuse the demand for normative justification as self-defeating, and to opt for the cultivation of an appropriate ethical sensibility through an emphasis on critique as a performative practice of the self. I offer in conclusion some thoughts on what such practice may look like for Foucault. (shrink)

In this article I assess Georges Canguilhem's historical epistemology with both theoretical and historical questions in mind. From a theoretical point of view, I am concerned with the relation between history and philosophy, and in particular with the philosophical assumptions and external norms that are involved in history writing. Moreover, I am concerned with the role that history can play in the understanding and evaluation of philosophical concepts. From a historical point of view, I regard historical epistemology, as developed by (...) Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem, as a conception and practice which came out of the project, elaborated in France from the 1920s to the 1940s, of combining history of science and philosophy. I analyse in particular Canguilhem's epistemology in his theory and practice of history of science. What he called 'normative history' is the focus of my analysis. I evaluate the question of the nature and provenience of the norm employed in normative history, and I compare it with the norm as discussed by Canguilhem in Le normal et le pathologique. While I am critical of Canguilhem's treatment of history, I conclude that his philosophical suggestion to analyse the formation of scientific concepts 'from below' represents a useful model for history and philosophy of science, and that it can be very profitably extended to philosophical concepts. (shrink)

In the late 1960s, Georges Canguilhem introduced the concept of ‘scientific ideology’. This concept had not played any role in his previous work, so why introduce it at all? This is the central question of my paper. Although it may seem a rather modest question, its answer in fact uncovers hidden tensions in the tradition of historical epistemology, in particular between its normative and descriptive aspects. The term ideology suggests the influence of Althusser’s and Foucault’s philosophies. However, I show the (...) differences between Canguilhem’s concept of scientific ideology and Althusser’s and Foucault’s respective concepts of ideology. I argue that Canguilhem was in fact attempting to solve long-standing problems in the tradition of historical epistemology, rather than following the lead of his younger colleagues. I argue that Canguilhem’s ‘refurbishment without rejection’ of Bachelard’s epistemology, which the concept of scientific ideology was aimed to implement, was necessary to justify the historical narratives that Canguilhem had constructed in his own work as a historian of concepts. A strict acceptance of Bachelard’s epistemology would have made it impossible to justify them. Canguilhem’s concept of scientific ideology therefore served as a theoretical justification of his practice as a historian. I maintain that the concept of scientific ideology was needed to reconcile Bachelard’s normative epistemology with Canguilhem’s view of the history of science and its aims, which differed from Bachelard’s more than it is generally acknowledged. (shrink)

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This paper critically evaluates Foucault’s relation to Bachelard and Canguilhem. It reconsiders the relevance of the concept of “influence” for treating this relation in order to register the more sceptical position Foucault adopts towards knowledge practices than either of these figures from twentieth-century French epistemology.

Examining Georges Canguilhem’s enduring attention to the problem of error, from his early writings to Michel Foucault’s first major responses to his work, this pathbreaking book shows that the historian of science was also a centrally important philosopher in postwar France. Samuel Talcott elucidates Canguilhem’s contributions by drawing on previously neglected publications and archival sources to trace the continuity of commitment that led him to alter his early anti-vitalist, pacifist positions in the face of political catastrophe and concrete human problems. (...) Talcott shows how Canguilhem critically appropriated the philosophical work of Alain, Bergson, Bachelard, and many others while developing his own distinct writings on medicine, experimentation, and scientific concepts in an ethical and political endeavor to resist alienation and injustice. And, while suggesting Canguilhem’s sometimes surprising philosophical importance for a range of younger thinkers, the book demonstrates Foucault’s own critical allegiance to Canguilhem’s spirit, techniques, and investigations. (shrink)

This paper defends Michel Foucault’s notion of archaeology of knowledge against the influential and putatively devastating criticism by Dreyfus and Rabinow that Foucault’s archaeological project is based on an incoherent conception of the rules of the discursive practices it purports to study. I argue first that Foucault’s considered view of these rules as simultaneously implicit and historically efficacious corresponds to a general requirement for the normative structure of a discursive practice. Then I argue that Foucault is entitled to that view (...) despite the charges to the contrary by Dreyfus and Rabinow. I also explain in detail how the argument by Dreyfus and Rabinow arises from a misunderstanding of Foucault’s archaeological project as transcendental inquiry, while archaeology of knowledge is, in fact, a diagnostic project. The result is a novel understanding of the notion of archaeology of knowledge that enables a reassessment of Foucault’s philosophical work in connection with current debates regarding the relationship between reflection and practice in the structure of thought. (shrink)

The book proposes that Foucault's archaeology is a direct response to the predicament for thought in modernity that he described in the closing chapters of The Order of Things, and that science and mathematics are fundamental to the possibility of this response. Centered around the figure of man, Foucault described thinking in modernity as split between empirical and transcendental forms of enquiry, neither of which is able to secure a foundation. To understand how Foucault responds to this situation, the book (...) sets out a series of key ideas in the work of Gaston Bachelard, Jean Cavaillès, and Michel Serres that pave the way for Foucault's account of the historical character of the formal conditions of knowledge. In this way, Foucault's conception of discourse, and above all of the historical a priori, can be understood against the background of what he calls the mathematical a priori. The book also provides an analysis of what Foucault calls ‘temporal dispersion’, tracing this idea back to his critique of Kant. Employing these ideas, the book goes on to provide a detailed commentary on Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge. (shrink)