Abstract
The main works of Foucault published during the 1960s are “archaeological,” in the sense Foucault gave to this term. I shall in this chapter discuss first the origin of the term “archaeology” in his writings and a concept that became central to his mature archaeological work, the episteme.
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- 1.
There is a good reason not to count this book among Foucault’s main works: Foucault renounced both editions and tried to prevent the translation of the later version into English (see Eribon 1991, p. 70).
- 2.
For a good introductory discussion of Bachelard and Canguilhem, see Gutting (1989), pp. 9–54; and Dews (1992). Mary Tiles’s (1984) book on Bachelard is intended to make his work more accessible to analytic philosophers of science. A critical view of the influence of Bachelard and Canguilhem on Foucault is offered by Ross (2018).
- 3.
The terms “surface knowledge” and “depth knowledge” are borrowed from Ian Hacking, see Hacking (1979), p. 42.
- 4.
I am using the terms “discourse” and “text” in a non-technical sense as Foucault did in The Order of Things. In The Archaeology of Knowledge a discourse denotes both a group of statements and a linguistic practice (Foucault 1972, pp. 80, 107), in either case discourse is strictly a linguistic entity. Social relations, institutions and economic processes are nondiscursive factors that have complex relations to discursive factors, relations that are not made all that clear in Foucault’s archaeological work (Gutting 1989, pp. 256–258; but see also Tiisala 2015, pp. 666–668).
- 5.
- 6.
I owe this observation to Ian Hacking, personal communication.
- 7.
David Ricardo (1772–1823) was a British national economist and advocate of classical national economics; Georges Baron de Cuvier (1769–1832) was a French zoologist and paleontologist, founder of comparative anatomy and the “catastrophe theory” (according to which extinct species were destroyed in natural catastrophes); and Franz Bopp (1791–1867) was a German linguist and the founder of comparative linguistics.
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Árnason, G. (2018). Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge. In: Foucault and the Human Subject of Science. SpringerBriefs in Ethics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02813-8_2
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