The Philosophy of Foucault

"I’d put it this way: May is a philosopher who sees Foucault’s work as dealing throughout with a single philosophical question. This question is: ‘Who are we?’ May is interested in studying Foucault’s treatment of this question because he thinks Foucault rightly understands it as both social and historical. The question is not who I am but who we are, and Foucault seeks an answer not in a fixed essence but in the temporal processes that have led to who we are now. In that sense, May is seeing Foucault as first of all a philosopher, although one whose project requires the skills of an historian and an extensive engagement with the disciplines that study social phenomena. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter May is a wonderfully lucid expositor of Foucault, but this book goes beyond a mere introduction. It’s May’s personal philosophical reflection on Foucault’s work and seeks not only to passively “understand” Foucault but also to see how we might think along with Foucault. As some reviewers have said, you may not want to make May’s book the first thing you read about Foucault—although it can provide a fine introduction—but you definitely should turn to it once you’re a bit further along. I’m leery of thinking of Foucault in terms of any of the standard areas of current academic philosophy ( metaphysics , epistemology, ethics , etc.). Foucault’s philosophizing was always embedded in an effort to understand specific historical events, like the confinement of the mad in 17th-century France or the birth of the prison in 19th-century England. Even when he puts forward what seem to be philosophical theories (e.g., of power in The History of Sexuality I ), he’s in fact just sharpening an intellectual tool that he finds helpful for making his historical points. What might seem to be part of a philosophical edifice is just a bit of scaffolding that Foucault may well abandon as he moves to other projects. Also, recall that the ultimate point of all Foucault’s studies is to question the knowledge-claims of some contemporary disciplines (psychiatry, criminology, etc.). This is something quite different from a philosophical effort to provide answers to fundamental questions. I can (just barely) imagine Foucault someday entering the pantheon of paradigmatic philosophers, but that could happen only if philosophy as an academic discipline became something quite different from what it has long been."