Michael Foucault's writing has shaped the teaching of half a dozen disciplines, ranging from literary criticism to the history of criminology. But none of his books offers a satisfactory introduction to the entire complex body of his work. The Foucault Reader precisely serves that purpose. It contains selections from each area of Foucault's thought, a wealth of previously unpublished writings, and an interview with Foucault during which he discusses his philosophy with unprecedented candor.

"We are trying to apply the concepts of an outdated world view--the mechanistic world view of Cartesian-Newtonian science--to a reality that can no longer be understood in terms of these concepts.

Without doubt Michel Foucault was one of the 20th century's towering intellectuals. His work on organization of knowledge, sexuality, power, discipline, medicine, madness, identity, and politics has left an idelible mark on contemporary thinking in these fields. Edited by one of the world's most distinguished Foucault scholars, Barry Smart, this collection sets Foucault's work in the the appropriate historical and intellectual context by orgaizing the material thematically with introductions that quide the reader through the complexities of the essays. These volumes (...) will be essential reading wherever the work of Foucault is debated and applied. (shrink)

"The Foundations is for the general reader who possesses 'common rational knowledge of morality' but lacks a philosophical theory of it."--Translator's introduction.

A series of essays on the development of medicine in the century of the Enlightenment, illustrating the decline in the role of religion in medical thinking, and the increased use of reason.

This book includes chapters on the most representative structuralists (in anthropology, Marxism, psychoanalysis, literature, and history) as well as on their opponents (in Marxism, hermeneutics, and sociology), so that this book about structuralism also put structuralism in its intellectual and political milieu.