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Michel Foucault introduced a new form of political thinking and discourse. Rather than seeking to understand the grand unities of state, economy, or exploitation, he tried to discover the micropolitical workings of everyday life that have often founded the greater unities. He was particularly concerned with how we understand ourselves psychologically, and thus with how psychological knowledge developed and came to be accepted as true. In the course of his writings, he developed a genealogy of psychology, an account of psychology as a historically developed practice of power.

The problem such an account raises for much of traditional philosophy is that Foucault's critique of psychological concepts is ultimately a critique of the idea of the mind as a politically neutral ontological concept. As such, it renders politically suspect all forms of subjective foundationalism, and the epistemological justification for Foucault's own writings is then called into question. Drawing on the writings of such Anglo-American philosophers as Wilfrid Sellars and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Todd May refutes the idea that Foucault's critiques of knowledge, and especially psychological knowledge, undermine themselves.

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CHOICE Review

Although there are more technical and more critical studies of the thought of Foucault, May (Clemson Univ.) has written one of the better introductions in English. Appropriately dividing Foucault's writings into three stages (archaeology, genealogy, ethics), May maintains that Foucault was concerned with the micropolitics of knowledge or knowledge-domains elucidated via the genealogical method. It is clearly shown how Foucault exposed the multiplicity of micropowers and macropowers operative in historical social systems. May spends a good deal of time on the genealogical method, stressing that its antifoundationalism tends to undermine his own need for epistemic grounds. The lucid treatment of transgression clears away the ambiguities that can surround the borrowings of this concept by others. Again the clarity of May's discussions of epist=em=ei (knowledges) shows a deep understanding of Foucault's use of this Nietzsche-inspired concept. Lengthy discussions of the epistemological paradoxes entailed by Foucault's subversion of truth, with references to Sellars and Wittgenstein, are informed, critical, and relevant to problems encountered in any critical epistemology. May artfully combines careful exposition with insightful criticism, often calling attention to the question of the "justification" of Foucault's discourse of subversion. Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates and up. G. J. Stack; SUNY College at Brockport

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Todd May is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Clemson University.