Catarina Dutilh Novaes, Conceptual genealogy for analytic philosophy – Part II.4: Foucault on archeology and genealogy, New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science, 13 January 2015
Extract
I am now back to working on my conceptual genealogy project; this post is the fifth installment of a series of posts on the project. Part I is here; Part II.1 is here; Part II.2 is here; Part II.3 is here; a tentative abstract of 2 years ago, detailing the motivation for the project, is here.
In this section, I pitch genealogy against its close cousin archeology in order to argue that genealogy really is what is needed for the general project of historically informed analyses of philosophical concepts that I am articulating. And naturally, this leads me to Foucault. As always, comments welcome! (This is the first time in like 20 years that I do anything remotely serious with Foucault’s ideas: why did it take me so long? Lots of good stuff there.)
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I hope to have argued more or less convincingly by now that, given the specific historicist conception of philosophical concepts I’ve just sketched, genealogy is a particularly suitable method for historically informed philosophical analysis. In the next section, a few specific examples will be provided. However, and as mentioned above, I take genealogy to be one among other such historical methods, so there are options. Why is genealogy a better option than the alternatives? In order to address this question, in this section I pitch genealogy against one of its main ‘competitors’ as a method for historical analysis: archeology. Naturally, this confrontation leads me directly to Foucault.
As is well known, early in his career Foucault developed and applied the archeological method in a number of works, which then received a more explicit methodological reflection in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969).
An “archaeology of knowledge” is an investigation that examines artifacts unearthed in an excavation, but the kind of artifact is not bone, pottery, or metalwork, it is what people said and wrote in the past: their “statements” (in French, énoncé: what has been enunciated or expressed). (Packer 2010, 345)
Foucault News 