Michel Foucault has become famous for a series of books that have permanently altered our understanding of many institutions of Western society. He analyzed mental institutions in the remarkable Madness and Civilization; hospitals in The Birth of the Clinic; prisons in Discipline and Punish; and schools and families in The History of Sexuality. But the general reader as well as the specialist is apt to miss the consistent purposes that lay behind these difficult individual studies, thus losing sight of (...) the broad social vision and political aims that unified them. Now, in this superb set of essays and interviews, Foucault has provided a much-needed guide to Foucault. These pieces, ranging over the entire spectrum of his concerns, enabled Foucault, in his most intimate and accessible voice, to interpret the conclusions of his research in each area and to demonstrate the contribution of each to the magnificent -- and terrifying -- portrait of society that he was patiently compiling. For, as Foucault shows, what he was always describing was the nature of power in society; not the conventional treatment of power that concentrates on powerful individuals and repressive institutions, but the much more pervasive and insidious mechanisms by which power "reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives" Foucault's investigations of prisons, schools, barracks, hospitals, factories, cities, lodgings, families, and other organized forms of social life are each a segment of one of the most astonishing intellectual enterprises of all time -- and, as this book proves, one which possesses profound implications for understanding the social control of our bodies and our minds. (shrink)

In this remarkable book Michel Foucault, one of the most influential thinkers of recent times, calls us to look critically at specific historical events in order to uncover new layers of significance.

«La recherche ici entreprise implique donc le projet délibéré d’être à la fois historique et critique, dans la mesure où il s’agit, hors de toute intention prescriptive, de déterminer les conditions de possibilité de l’expérience médicale telle que l’époque moderne l’a connue. Une fois pour toutes, ce livre n’est pas écrit pour une médecine contre une autre, ou contre la médecine pour une absence de médecine. Ici comme ailleurs, il s’agit d’une étude qui essaie de dégager dans l’épaisseur du discours (...) les conditions de son histoire.» (Michel Foucault) Naissance de la clinique constitue aussi, à travers une analyse historique et critique de la constitution du sujet, le malade, tel qu’il peut devenir objet de connaissance, la naissance d’une oeuvre philosophique qui va marquer durablement la pensée contemporaine internationale. (shrink)

The Care of the Self is the third and possibly final volume of Michel Foucault’s widely acclaimed examination of "the experience of sexuality in Western society." Foucault takes us into the first two centuries of our own era, into the Golden Age of Rome, to reveal a subtle but decisive break from the classical Greek vision of sexual pleasure. He skillfully explores the whole corpus of moral reflection among philosophers and physicians of the era, and uncovers an increasing mistrust (...) of pleasure and growing anxiety over sexual activity and its consequences. (shrink)

The Hermeneutics of the Subject is the third volume in the collection of Michel Foucault's lectures at the College de France, one of the world's most prestigious institutions. Faculty at the college give public lectures, in which they can present works-in-progress on any subject of their choosing. Foucault's were more speculative and free-ranging than the arguments of such groundbreaking works as The History of Sexuality or Madness and Civilization . In the lectures comprising this volume, Foucault focuses upon the (...) ways the "self" and consequently "self-study" have been conceived since the days of antiquity, starting with Socrates. Definitions and conceptions of "self-study" in Greek and Roman literature, Foucault argues, remain in force today, and underlie modern interpretations of the self. Engaging, engrossing, and provocative, The Hermeneutics of the Subject reveals Foucault at the height of his powers. (shrink)

An examination of the relation between war and politics, by one of the twentieth century’s most influential thinkers From 1971 until 1984 at the College de France, Michel Foucault gave a series of lectures ranging freely and conversationally over the range of his research. In Society Must Be Defended , Foucault deals with the emergence in the early seventeenth century of a new understanding of war as the permanent basis of all institutions of power, a hidden presence within society (...) that could be deciphered by an historical analysis. Tracing this development, Foucault outlines the genealogy of power and knowledge that had become his dominant concern. (shrink)

The second volume in an unprecedented publishing event: the complete College de France lectures of one of the most influential thinkers of the last century Michel Foucault remains among the towering intellectual figures of postmodern philosophy. His works on sexuality, madness, the prison, and medicine are classics his example continues to challenge and inspire. From 1971 until his death in 1984, Foucault gave public lectures at the world-famous College de France. These lectures were seminal events. Attended by thousands, they (...) created benchmarks for contemporary critical inquiry. The lectures comprising Abnormal begin by examining the role of psychiatry in modern criminal justice, and its method of categorizing individuals who "resemble their crime before they commit it." Building on the themes of societal self-defense in the first volume of this series, Foucault shows how and why defining "abnormality" and "normality" were prerogatives of power in the nineteenth century, shaping the institutions--from the prison system to the family--meant to deal in particular with “monstrosity,” whether sexual, phsyical, or spiritual. The College de France lectures add immeasurably to our appreciation of Foucault's thought, and offer a unique window on his singular worldview. (shrink)

When it was first published in France in 1961 as Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la Folie à l'âge Classique , few had heard of a thirty-four year old philosopher by the name of Michel Foucault. By the time an abridged English edition was published in 1967 as Madness and Civilization , Michel Foucault had shaken the intellectual world. This translation is the first English edition of the complete French texts of the first and second edition, including all (...) prefaces and appendices, some of them unavailable in the existing French edition. History of Madness begins in the Middle Ages with vivid descriptions of the exclusion and confinement of lepers. Why, Foucault asks, when the leper houses were emptied at the end of the Middle Ages, were they turned into places of confinement for the mad? Why, within the space of several months in 1656, was one out of every hundred people in Paris confined? Shifting brilliantly from Descartes and early Enlightenment thought to the founding of the Hôpital Général in Paris and the work of early psychiatrists Philippe Pinel and Samuel Tuke, Foucault focuses throughout, not only on scientific and medical analyses of madness, but also on the philosophical and cultural values attached to the mad. He also urges us to recognize the creative and liberating forces that madness represents, brilliantly drawing on examples from Goya, Nietzsche, Van Gogh and Artaud. The History of Madness is an inspiring and classic work that challenges us to understand madness, reason and power and the forces that shape them. (shrink)

In his book, Physical Relativity, Harvey Brown challenges the orthodox view that special relativity is preferable to those parts of Lorentz's classical ether theory it replaced because it revealed various phenomena that were given a dynamical explanation in Lorentz's theory to be purely kinematical. I want to defend this orthodoxy. The phenomena most commonly discussed in this context in the philosophical literature are length contraction and time dilation. I consider three other phenomena of this kind that played a role in (...) the early reception of special relativity in the physics literature: the Fresnel drag effect in the Fizeau experiment, the velocity dependence of electron mass in beta-ray deflection experiments by Kaufmann and others, and the delicately balanced torques on a moving charged capacitor in the Trouton-Noble experiment. I offer historical sketches of how Lorentz's dynamical explanations of these phenomena came to be replaced by their now standard kinematical explanations. I then take up the philosophical challenge posed by the work of Harvey Brown and Oliver Pooley and clarify how those kinematical explanations work. (shrink)

Le thème “phénoménologie et religion” me pose doublement problème. 1) D’un côté l’orientation phénoménologique est quelque chose à quoi j’ai eu l’impression d’adhérer longtemps, par quoi je me sentais identifié même. Pourtant, je m’en sens de plus en plus séparé, par un indéfinissable écart stylistique au moins. De plus, je n’ai jamais accepté le virage à une phénoménologie de l’être-au-monde, qui me semble dominer l’espace français pour y fixer le visage et l’identité de ce que l’on tient po...

A part of the “return to religion” now evident in European philosophy, this book represents the culmination of the career of a leading phenomenological thinker whose earlier works trace a trajectory from Marx through a genealogy of psychoanalysis that interprets Descartes’s “I think, I am” as “I feel myself thinking, I am.” In this book, Henry does not ask whether Christianity is “true” or “false.” Rather, what is in question here is what Christianity considers as truth, what kind of truth (...) it offers to people, what it endeavors to communicate to them, not as a theoretical and indifferent truth, but as the essential truth that by some mysterious affinity is suitable for them, to the point that it alone is capable of ensuring them salvation. In the process, Henry inevitably argues against the concept of truth that dominates modern thought and determines, in its multiple implications, the world in which we live. Henry argues that Christ undoes “the truth of the world,” that He is an access to the infinity of self-love, to a radical subjectivity that admits no outside, to the immanence of affective life found beyond the despair fatally attached to all objectifying thought. The Kingdom of God accomplishes itself in the here and now through the love of Christ in what Henry calls “the auto-affection of Life.” In this condition, he argues, all problems of lack, ambivalence, and false projection are resolved. (shrink)

Translator's preface -- Introduction: The question of phenomenology -- Hyletic phenomenology and material phenomenology -- The phenomenological method -- Pathos-with reflections on Husserl's Fifth cartesian meditation -- For a phenomenology of community.

INTRODUCTION THE PROBLEM OF THE BEING OF THE EGO AND THE FUNDAMENTAL PRESUPPOSITIONS OF ONTOLOGY "Mit dem cogito sum beansprucht Descartes, der Philosophic ...

A critical reflection on John Woods's new monograph, Truth in Fiction – Rethinking its Logic. I focus in particular on Woods’s world-inheritance thesis (what others have variously called ‘background,’ ‘the principle of minimal departure,’ and ‘the reality assumption,’ and which replaces Woods’s earlier ‘fill-conditions’) and its interplay with auctorial say-so, arguing that world-inheritance actually constrains auctorial say-so in ways Woods has not anticipated.

« Qu’est-ce que la philosophie et quel est son rôle aujourd’hui? Entre juillet et octobre 1966, quelques mois après la parution des Mots et les Choses, Michel Foucault, dans un manuscrit très soigneusement rédigé mais qu’il ne publiera pas, apporte sa réponse à cette question tant débattue.À la différence de ceux qui, à l’époque, s’attachent à dévoiler l’essence de la philosophie ou à en prononcer la mort, Foucault l’appréhende, dans sa matérialité, comme un discours dont il convient de dégager (...) l’économie eu égard aux autres discours (scientifique, fictif, ordinaire, religieux) qui circulent dans un contexte donné.Le Discours philosophique propose ainsi une nouvelle manière de faire l’histoire de la philosophie, qui la décentre du commentaire des grands philosophes. Nietzsche y occupe toutefois une place particulière car il inaugure une conjoncture où la philosophie devient une entreprise de diagnostic du présent. Il revient en effet désormais à la philosophie de dire, à partir de l’« archive intégrale » d’une culture, ce qui en fait l’actualité.Si L’Archéologie du savoir, consacré aux enjeux méthodologiques d’un tel projet, s’y annonce, nulle part autant que dans Le Discours philosophique Michel Foucault n’aura explicité les ambitions de son programme intellectuel.»--. (shrink)

This paper takes as its point of departure two striking incongruities between scientiªc practice and trends in modern history and philosophy of science. (1) Many modern historians of science are so preoccupied with local scientiªc practices that they fail to recognize important non-local elements. (2) Many modern philosophers of science make a sharp distinction between explanation and evidence, whereas in scientiªc practice explanatory power is routinely used as evidence for scientiªc claims. I draw attention to one speciªc way in..

Volume 3 in the ESSENTIAL WORKS OF FOUCAULT series, a collection of articles, interviews and seminars on the subject of Western political culture, written by the twentieth century French philosopher, Michel Foucault and translated into English. It includes issues such as sexuality, psychiatry, discrimination and exclusion in human society.

INTRODUCTION THE SEEMING CONTINGENCY OF THE QUESTION CONCERNING THE BODY AND THE NECESSITY FOR AN ONTOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF THE BODY When we disclose and..

Cet article propose l’étude d’un cas (dans deux films de Fassbinder) de ce que je nomme l’ iconologie nostalgique. Celle-ci consiste en une certaine manière de faire retour, par le cinéma comme outil d’expertise, sur quelques chefs-d’œuvre de l’histoire de la peinture, le film officiant comme révélateur iconique d’invention pour les figures peintes et nous permettant de voir et d’interpréter, par rebonds, le tableau pour la première fois, c’est-à-dire d’un regard jamais actualisé avant l’opération filmique.

Le christianisme bouleverse notre conception de l'homme parce qu'il refuse la manière dont celui-ci se comprend depuis toujours à partir du monde, de sa vérité et de ses lois. Selon le christianisme, l'homme ne procède pas du monde mais de Dieu: il est son " Fils ". Or Dieu est Vie, Vie qui ne se montre en aucun monde, qui s'éprouve elle-même dans son intériorité invisible. L'autorévélation de la Vie est l'essence de Dieu. Cette épreuve de soi de la Vie (...) fonde tout Soi et tout Moi, toute individualité et tout individu - tout " homme " concevable. L'opposition de la Vérité de la Vie et de la vérité du monde permet, d'autre part, de savoir que Jésus est le Christ. Dans le monde, Jésus a l'apparence d'un homme. C'est seulement en se plaçant à l'intérieur du mouvement de la Vie qu'on peut saisir comment celle-ci génère en elle un Premier Vivant et, en lui, tout vivant possible. Ce livre ne demande donc pas si le christianisme est vrai ou faux. Il met à nu le genre de Vérité que le christianisme professe et propose aux hommes. A partir d'une phénoménologie radicale du concept de " Vie ", il donne une idée extrêmement neuve, originale et forte de la Vérité du christianisme. (shrink)

Que la passivité nous constitue semble doublement établi. Elle est même désignée tant originaire qu’indéfectible. D’où la sait-on telle? De l’évidence et d’une critique. En l’évidence, nous la constatons, par la critique, Maurice Merleau-Ponty dit son caractère premier. La réfutation de l’idéalisme doit conduire à y consentir. Que montre-t-elle précisément? Que l’idéalisme est, pour nous, impossible, inéluctablement absent. Que serait-il? La stricte infidélité à l’égard de notre être. Être...

La q4e de couv. indique : "Quels programmes, quels paradigmes sous-tendent les recherches en sciences humaines, créent les écoles rivales et rapprochent des disciplines différentes? Comment chacune de ces disciplines parvient-elle à articuler la dimension historique et structurelle qui la compose? Comment se gèrent les rapports entre modélisations mathématiques et récits de situation? Quelle place est donnée aux causes, quelle signification accordée aux raisons? Faut-il opposer ou articuler explication et compréhension? Les sciences sociales sont des disciplines aux frontières incertaines? Les (...) unes, comme l'histoire ou la géographie, remontent à l'Antiquité. Les autres, comme la sociologie ou la psychologie sociale, ont tout juste un siècle. Certaines prennent pour objet l'ensemble des phénomènes sociaux et d'autres - l'économie, la linguistique, etc. - privilégient un domaine d'activité déterminé. Mais derrière cette diversité - d'origines, d'objet, de tradition - surgissent des points essentiels de rencontre et de recouvrement que synthétise et interroge ce manuel.". (shrink)

The Courage of the Truth is the last course that Michel Foucault delivered at the College de France before his death in 1984. In this course, he continues the theme of the previous year's lectures in exploring the notion of "truth-telling" in politics to establish a number of ethically irreducible conditionsbased on courage and conviction.

An interview with Michel Foucault in 1979 that was never published during his lifetime and was recently rediscovered in the archives. The interview, appearing for the first time in English and in its complete form, marks one of Foucault’s final public discussions of the contentious topic of the Iranian Revolution. In particular, Foucault clarifies what he means by “political spirituality” and addresses the respective relations between religion, revolution, and self-transformation.

Readers of this volume will notice that it contains only a few papers on general relativity. This is because most papers documenting the genesis and early development of general relativity were not published in Annalen der Physik . After Einstein took up his new prestigious position at the Prussian Academy of Sciences in the spring of 1914, the Sitzungsberichte of the Berlin academy almost by default became the main outlet for his scientific production. Two of the more important papers on (...) general relativity, however, did find their way into the pages of the Annalen [35,41]. Although I shall discuss both papers in this essay, the main focus will be on [35], the first systematic exposition of general relativity, submitted in March 1916 and published in May of that year. (shrink)

"I do not expect a good reception from professional philosophers" wrote Whitehead in 1929, immediately after the publication of Process and Reality. Indeed, it took nearly thirty years before scholars seriously started to try to decipher the book taken as a whole. And there remains today "professional" Whiteheadians who claim that this work can - or even should - be bracketed by anyone wishing to get a clear picture of Whitehead's true speculative agenda. Creativity and Its Discontents aims to provide (...) evidence of the conditions for this state of affairs by gathering and contextualizing all the major reviews (translated where need be) of Process and Reality: its original 1929 edition, its various translations (some of them still ongoing) and its 1978 corrected edition. It is designed as the ideal tool to accompany the recently published Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought. (shrink)

Biogea is a mixture of poetry, philosophy, science, and biography exemplary of the style that has made Michel Serres one of the most extraordinary thinkers of his age. His philosophical and poetic inquiry sings in praise of earth and life, what he names singularly as Biogea. In these times when species are disappearing, when catastrophic events such as earthquakes and tsunamis impale the earth, Serres wonders if anyone “worries about the death pangs of the rivers.” And for Serres, one (...) can ask the same question of philosophy as the humanities increasingly find themselves in need of defenders. Today, all living organisms discover themselves part of this Biogea. “Today we have other neighbors, constituents of the Biogea: the sea, my lover; our mother, the Earth, becomes our daughter; this beautiful breeze which inspires the spirit, a spiritual mistress; our light friends, the fresh and flowing waters.”. (shrink)

L’exercice de la pensée est animé par une constitutive tendance à la totalité. Contre l’initiale apparence de sa vacuité, ou même de son indétermination il faut cependant lui rappeler qu’elle ne se réduit en rien à un simple exercice formel. Sa puissance propre, la « vertu de la pensée » la fait tendre à la perfection (DM XV). Reconnaître et surtout accomplir cette tendance, telle est en nous la première exigence d’une originaire fidélité. Penser constitue en nous l’activité au sens (...) propre. À... (shrink)

Pour retrouver la réalité, il faut d’abord de cesser de la penser à partir de ce qui l’absente. Rien en vérité ne nous empêche de la connaître et de l’éprouver comme absolue présence. Aucun irrémédiable exil ne nous en sépare. Revenir à la plénitude substantielle impose cependant d’abandonner tout rapport d’extériorité, pour enfin redécouvrir que « dans l’absolu nous sommes, … » (664)). L’on ne pourra ainsi échapper à la vacuité qu’en se délivrant des scissions qui nous absentent, et nous (...) év... (shrink)

Que désigne « nature »? Assurément une réalité donnée, qui par opposition à l’artifice ne résulte ni d’un travail, ni d’une activité ou encore d’une volonté. Nature nomme tout à la fois une détermination ontologique, un être effectif, ainsi qu’une détermination particulière. Le terme ne prend en effet tout son sens que par la désignation directe du « naturel » en sa spécificité. Poser qu’« il y a » nature demeure insuffisant. La nommer, c’est dire ce qui est naturel. De (...) fait la thèse de la n... (shrink)

L’exercice de la volonté nous impose, semble-t-il, une fidélité conflictuelle. Faut-il en effet, accueillir et préserver en elle ce qui en fait la spécificité, la puissance de rupture qui l’arrache au donné? Faut-il, tout au contraire, l’exercer en vue du consentement, la menant ainsi, dans et par l’abolition du détachement, à la plénitude d’un accord? Deux exercices, et deux compréhensions, de sa nature et de son statut s’opposent. Vouloir, n’est-ce pas exercer une puissance formelle, intr...

t. 1. De la phénoménologie -- t. 2. De la subjectivité -- t. 3. de l'art et du politique -- t. 4. Sur léthique et la religion.

Ce livre de Michel Freitag interpelle "tous ceux qui s'interrogent sur la place qu'ils tiennent ou le rôle qu'ils jouent dans l'aventure de l'Université contemporaine." (Georges Leroux, Spirale) Une des constantes des écrits contenus dans ce livre "réside dans la comparaison systématique que Michel Freitag établit entre les caractéristiques de la modernité et celles de la postmodernité et les conséquences de celle-ci sur le traitement des enjeux et des problèmes actuels." (Louis Guay, Anthropologie et société) "Dans une société (...) réduite au bavardage, à l'insignifiance, à la poursuite de petits bonheurs mesquins, le tout sous contrôle bureaucratique de plus en plus envahissant, une telle réflexion est devenue essentielle. Voici un livre de bonne foi qui n'attend que ses lecteurs, qu'on souhaite nombreux." (Robert Major, Voix et images). (shrink)

This book’s basic argument is that the Freudian unconscious, far from constituting a radical break with the philosophy of consciousness, is merely the latest exemplar in a heritage of philosophical misunderstanding of the Cartesian cogito that interprets “I think, therefore I am” as “I represent myself, therefore I am” (in the classic interpretation of Heidegger, one of the targets of the book).

This collection gives a complete picture of Foucault's importance as a thinker and social critic who transcended academic boundaries to challenge entrenched, institutionalized models of theoretical rationality and practical normalcy. (Philosophy).

In publications in 1914 and 1918, Einstein claimed that his new theory of gravity somehow relativizes the rotation of a body with respect to the distant stars and the acceleration of the traveler with respect to the stay-at-home in the twin paradox. What he showed was that phenomena seen as inertial effects in a space-time coordinate system in which the non-accelerating body is at rest can be seen as a combination of inertial and gravitational effects in a space-time coordinate system (...) in which the accelerating body is at rest. Two different relativity principles play a role in these accounts: the relativity of non-uniform motion, in the weak sense that the laws of physics are the same in the two space-time coordinate systems involved; what Einstein in 1920 called the relativity of the gravitational field, the notion that there is a unified inertio-gravitational field that splits differently into inertial and gravitational components in different coordinate systems. I provide a detailed reconstruction of Einstein's rather sketchy accounts of the twins and the bucket and examine the role of these two relativity principles. I argue that we can hold on to but that is either false or trivial. (shrink)

Les Leçons d'histoire de la philosophie du droit sont un jalon fondamental de la philosophie du droit de Michel Villey. Elles ambitionnent de construire une synthèse des apports nécessaires et successifs de l'histoire de la philosophie : " Il ne suffit plus de s'installer dans le sillage du seul Thomas, celui de Kant ou celui de Comte ; mais toutes ces doctrines ensemble sont les données de notre problème. Seule aura chance d'être acceptée par le corps social, seule pourra (...) devenir efficace, seule sera vraie la philosophie qui aura su réunir et réconcilier, sans en sacrifier aucun, ces aspects encore dispersés de la tradition. " A l'heure en particulier où les juges retrouvent progressivement leur rôle social fondamental, les juristes doivent relire ces développements qui leur confèrent collectivement le lourd privilège de réaliser la Justice, non pas idéale, mais simplement possible et concrète. (shrink)

Provides an assessment of the overcoming of metaphysics urged by Nietzsche--a critical and reconstructive overcoming. He also probes Nietzsche's project of subverting subjectivity.