Foucault News

Jean Hyppolite, Michel Foucault, Georges Canguilhem, Dina Dreyfus, 1965 (source: Institut national de l’audiovisuel, via Foucault Blog)

As part of my research on the very early Foucault, I’ve been looking at the work of some of his teachers and other inspirations. One of those figures was Georges Canguilhem, who ended up being the rapporteur for Foucault’s doctoral thesis on the history of madness. Canguilhem is a major figure in the history and philosophy of science, best known for The Normal and the Pathological, but author of several other important studies. Many, but by no means all, of his works are translated into English. The links between Canguilhem and Foucault are not quite as straight-forward as are sometimes claimed, with Foucault having written the entire thesis before showing it to Canguilhem, and it’s not clear that Foucault actually attended any classes by him in the early 1950s. Nonetheless…