Foucault's Archaeology ─ Science and Transformation

This book provides a new persepctive on Foucault's "The Archaeology of Knowledge" by revealing the extent to which its approach to language was influenced by the mathematical sciences. Setting out this background to Foucault's analysis makes the Archaeology of Knowledge both accessible in a new way, and relevant to issues that are at the heart of much contemporary debate over the nature of critical thought and the relation between philosophy and the sciences. David Webb sheds new light on a crucial period of Foucault's work by highlighting his relation to thinkers such as Cavailles and Serres. By doing so, he aims to provide a reading of The Archaeology of Knowledge that puts it at the heart of Foucault's thought. Rather than attempting a scientific study of language as such, Foucault is shown to have adopted a mode of thought indebted to thinkers in the scientific and epistemological tradition. The book argues that it was by aligning his thought in this way with the challenge to Kantian philosophy from mathematics and science in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that Foucault established his own perspective on the future of critical philosophy.

David Webb is Senior Lecturer at the Staffordshire University