Michel Foucault reading group

## Goals

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This project aims to gather an interested group of individuals who will read and discuss texts by Michel Foucault.

## Background

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From the Wikipedia article  Michel Foucault (IPA pronunciation: [miʃel fuko]; English-speakers' pronunciation varies) (October 15, 1926 – June 25, 1984) was a French philosopher. He held a chair at the Collège de France, which he gave the title "The History of Systems of Thought." His writings have had an enormous impact: Foucault's influence extends across the humanities and social sciences and into applied and professional areas of study.

Foucault is known for his critical studies of various social institutions, most notably psychiatry, medicine, parameters of educational timeframes, and the prison system, and also for his work on the history of sexuality. His work concerning power and the relation between power and knowledge, as well as his ideas concerning "discourse" in relation to the history of Western thought, have been widely discussed and applied.

His work is often described as postmodernist or post-structuralist by commentators and critics; during the 1960s, however, he was more often associated with the structuralist movement. Although he was initially happy with this description, he later emphasized his distance from the structuralist approach, and he always unequivocally rejected the 'post-structuralist' and 'postmodernist' labels.

## Learning Project Summary

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Each month a text will be chosen and the group will read it and then post comments and questions to this Learning Group.

* Introduction to Foucault

## Suggested Texts

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December 2006 The Archeology of Knowledge

## Learning Activities

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* Read the Introduction to The Archeology of Knowledge
* Post questions, comments and responses to the Talk:Michel Foucault reading group
* Read The Unities of Discourse Chapter 1 of part 2 of The Archeology of Knowledge
* Post questions, comments and responses to the Talk:Michel Foucault reading group

## Texts

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Copied from Wikipedia article  Michel Foucault

Year  | Original French  | English Translation

|
|

1954  | Maladie mentale et personnalité (Paris: PUF, 1954) re-edited as Maladie mentale et psychologie (1995)  | Mental Illness and Psychology trans. by A. M. Sheridan-Smith, (New York: Harper and Row, 1976)
1961  | Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique - Folie et déraison (Paris: Plon, 1961)  | Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason trans. by R. Howard, (London: Tavistock, 1965) - this is a greatly abridged version
1963  | Naissance de la clinique - une archéologie du regard médical (Paris: PUF, 1963)  | The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception
1963  | Raymond Roussel (Paris: Gallimard, 1963)  | Death and the Labyrinth: the World of Raymond Roussel
1966  | Les mots et les choses - une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris : Gallimard, 1966)  | The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
1969  | L'archéologie du savoir (Paris : Gallimard, 1969)  | Archaeology of Knowledge) (first three chapters available here)
1971  | L'ordre du discours (Paris : Gallimard, 1971)  | 'The Discourse in Language'; translation appears as an appendix to the Archaeology of Knowledge
1975  | Surveiller et punir (Paris : Gallimard, 1975)  | Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
1976-84  | Histoire de la sexualité

* Vol I: La Volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976)
* Vol II: L'Usage des plaisirs (Paris: Gallimard, 1984)
* Vol III: Le Souci de soi (Paris: Gallimard, 1984)

| The History of Sexuality

* Vol I: The Will to Knowledge
* Vol II: The Use of Pleasure
* Vol III: The Care of the Self

## References

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### Wikipedia articles

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* Michel Foucault
* Madness and Civilization
* The Order of Things
* The Archaeology of Knowledge
* Discipline and Punish
* The History of Sexuality

## Active participants

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Active participants in this Learning Group

* Mystictim 00:58, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
* Executivezen 16:21 4 November 2006 (UTC)
* Cormaggio beep 11:49, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

* v
* t
* e

Major contemporary Western philosophers

Analytic|

* G.E.M. Anscombe
* Alfred Jules Ayer
* Isaiah Berlin
* Simon Blackburn
* Ned Block
* Laurence BonJour
* Robert Brandom
* David Chalmers
* Roderick Chisholm
* Noam Chomsky
* Patricia Churchland
* Paul Churchland
* Donald Davidson
* Daniel Dennett
* Fred Dretske
* Michael Dummett
* Gareth Evans
* Arthur Fine
* Jerry Fodor
* Ernest Gellner
* John Gray
* Susan Haack
* R.M. Hare
* Jaakko Hintikka
* Frank Jackson
* Jaegwon Kim
* Christine Korsgaard
* Saul Kripke
* Thomas Kuhn
* Keith Lehrer
* David Lewis
* Bryan Magee
* Ruth B. Marcus
* John McDowell
* Colin McGinn
* Thomas Nagel
* Robert Nozick
* Martha Nussbaum
* Alvin Plantinga
* Karl Popper
* Hilary Putnam
* W.V.O. Quine
* John Rawls
* Peter Railton
* Richard Rorty
* Roger Scruton
* Peter Singer
* John Searle
* J.J.C. Smart
* Ernest Sosa
* Charles Taylor
* Bernard Williams
* Timothy Williamson
* Crispin Wright

Continental European|

* Theodor W. Adorno
* Louis Althusser
* Giorgio Agamben
* Hannah Arendt
* Roland Barthes
* Alain Badiou
* Jean Baudrillard
* Maurice Blanchot
* Simone de Beauvoir
* Pierre Bourdieu
* Cornelius Castoriadis
* Emil Cioran
* Hélène Cixous
* Guy Debord
* Gilles Deleuze
* Jacques Derrida
* Michel Foucault
* Hans-Georg Gadamer
* Jürgen Habermas
* Werner Hamacher
* Martin Heidegger
* Max Horkheimer
* Edmund Husserl
* Peter Janich
* Julia Kristeva
* Henri Lefebvre
* Claude Lévi-Strauss
* Emmanuel Lévinas
* Jean-François Lyotard
* Paul de Man
* Herbert Marcuse
* Jean-Luc Nancy
* Antonio Negri
* Paul Ricoeur
* Jean Paul Sartre
* Michel Serres
* Ernst Tugendhat
* Paul Virilio
* Slavoj Žižek

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