Michel Foucault — "The history of thought is the history of systems of thought."
The history of thought is the history of systems of thought.
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More from Michel Foucault
"I am not a prophet, I am a diagnostician."
"The work of art is a scream."
"The history of sexuality is the history of the body."
"The greatest enemy of truth is not lies, but the illusion of truth."
"The role of the intellectual is not to tell others what to do, but to question what is taken for granted."
About Michel Foucault (1926-1984)
French philosopher and historian whose Discipline and Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality reframed power, knowledge, and institutions in modern thought. Closely associated with Jacques Derrida (deconstruction peer) and Gilles Deleuze (philosophical ally on power and difference). For an intellectual contrast, see Jürgen Habermas, German social theorist of communicative rationality — Habermas insisted on universal norms of reason — exactly the position Foucault's 'power/knowledge' framework treats as itself a power effect. The Foucault-Habermas debate is the canonical postwar argument over whether reason is universal-emancipatory or always-already complicit with power.
The standard scholarly entry points to Michel Foucault's work: Didier Eribon (French intellectual biographer) — Michel Foucault (1989); Stuart Elden (Warwick, political geographer) — Foucault's Last Decade (2016); Gary Gutting (Notre Dame, philosophy) — Foucault: A Very Short Introduction (2005). These are the works graduate seminars cite when teaching Michel Foucault.