Raffaele Grandoni
Dottorato University of Warwick
Abstract
In this paper I will focus on a specific aspect of Foucault’s oeuvre: the epistemological one. My aim is to show that Foucault’s heritage must not be reduced to his contributions to political and ethical theory, but that it must include an epistemological method for a critical inquiry on the nature of science, too.
In the first part, I will shed a light on Foucault’s relationship with the French epistemological tradition, especially with Bachelard’s and Canguilhem’s works. In the second part, I will define Foucault’s archaeological method and show how it transformed historical epistemology on three aspects: the level of analysis, the nature of the sciences investigated, the inclusion of power relations into the analysis. In the third part, I will consider Ian Hacking’s and Arnold Davidson’s works as a result of their using Foucault’s method for different sciences and concepts. In so doing, I hope to demonstrate how they take up what is Foucault’s heritage: an epistemological method that allows to analyze sciences not only in their theoretical dimension, but also in relation to their roles in the constitution of our subjectivity.
Keywords
Historical Epistemology – Archaeology – Dispositif – Style of Scientific Reasoning
DOI: 10.13131/2611-9757.suitefrancaise.n3.11
