The Foucault Reader

Michel Foucault was one of the most influential philosophical thinkers in the contemporary world, someone whose work has affected the teaching of half a dozen disciplines ranging from literary criticism to the history of criminology. But of his many books, not one offers a satisfactory introduction to the entire complex body of his work. The Foucault Reader was commissioned precisely to serve that purpose. The Reader contains selections from each area of Foucault's work as well as a wealth of previously unpublished writings, including important material written especially for this volume, the preface to the long-awaited second volume of The History of Sexuality, and interviews with Foucault himself, in the course of which he discussed his philosophy at first hand and with unprecedented candor. This philosophy comprises an astonishing intellectual enterprise: a minute and ongoing investigation of the nature of power in society. Foucault's analyses of this power as it manifests itself in society, schools, hospitals, factories, homes, families, and other forms of organized society are brought together in The Foucault Reader to create an overview of this theme and of the broad social and political vision that underlies it.

A brilliant work from the most influential philosopher since Sartre. In this indispensable work, a brilliant thinker suggests that such vaunted reforms as the abolition of torture and the emergence of the modern penitentiary have merely shifted the focus of punishment from the prisoner's body to his soul.

The writings of William James represent one of America's most original contributions to the history of ideas. Ranging from philosophy and psychology to religion and politics, James composed the most engaging formulation of American pragmatism. 'Pragmatism' grew out of a set of lectures and the full text is included here along with 'The Meaning of Truth', 'Psychology', 'The Will to Believe', and 'Talks to Teachers on Psychology'.

Michel Foucault was a twentieth-century philosopher of extraordinary talent, a political activist, social theorist, cultural critic and creative historian. He shaped the ways we think today about such controversial issues as power, sexuality, madness and criminality. Johanna Oksala explores the conceptual tools that Foucault gave us for constructing new forms of thinking as well as for smashing old certainties. She offers a lucid account of him as a thinker whose persistent aim was to challenge the self-evidence and seeming inevitability of our current experiences, practices and institutions by showing their historical development and, therefore, contingency. Extracts are taken from the whole range of Foucault's writings - his books, essays, lectures and interviews - including the major works History of Madness,The Order of Things, Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality.

Few philosophers have had as significant an impact on contemporary thought as Michel Foucault. Rabinow has collected the best pieces from his three-volume set into a one-volume anthology.

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.

Madness, sexuality, power, knowledge—are these facts of life or simply parts of speech? In a series of works of astonishing brilliance, historian Michel Foucault excavated the hidden assumptions that govern the way we live and the way we think. The Archaeology of Knowledge begins at the level of "things aid" and moves quickly to illuminate the connections between knowledge, language, and action in a style at once profound and personal. A summing up of Foucault's own methadological assumptions, this book is also a first step toward a genealogy of the way we live now. Challenging, at times infuriating, it is an absolutey indispensable guide to one of the most innovative thinkers of our time.

"In his critical interpretation of Kant's Anthropology, Michel Foucault warns against the dangers of treating psychology as a new metaphysics. Instead, he explores the possibility of studying man empirically as he is affected by time, art and technique, self-perception, and language. If man is both the condition for knowledge and its ultimate object, any empirical knowledge of man is inextricably tied up with language. Far from being a study of self-consciousness, anthropology is a way of questioning the limits of human knowledge and concrete existence." "Long unknown to Foucault readers, this text offers the first outline of what would later become Foucault's own frame of reference within the history of philosophy. Standing at a crossroad of his ouevre, it allows us to look back on Madness and Civilization while it sketches out the relationship between discourse and truth developed in The Order of Things. This "introduction" finally announces what will be considered the most scandalous aspect of Foucault's thought: the death of man, but also the joyous advent of the Ubermensch, the philosopher-artist capable of creating vital values."--BOOK JACKET.