Download Free The Cambridge Introduction To Michel Foucault Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online The Cambridge Introduction To Michel Foucault and write the review.

French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault is essential reading for students in departments of literature, history, sociology and cultural studies. His work on the institutions of mental health and medicine, the history of systems of knowledge, literature and literary theory, criminality and the prison system, and sexuality, has had a profound and enduring impact across the humanities and social sciences. This introductory book, written for students, offers in-depth critical and contextual perspectives on all of Foucault's major published works. It provides ways in to understanding Foucault's key concepts of subjectivity, discourse, and power and explains the problems of translation encountered in reading Foucault in English. The book also explores the critical reception of Foucault's works and acquaints the reader with the afterlives of some of his theories, particularly his influence on feminist and queer studies. This book offers the ideal introduction to a famously complex, controversial and important thinker.
For Michel Foucault, philosophy was a way of questioning the allegedly necessary truths that underpin the practices and institutions of modern society. He carried this out in a series of deeply original and strikingly controversial studies on the origins of modern medical and social scientific disciplines. These studies have raised fundamental questions about the nature of human knowledge and its relation to power structures, and have become major topics of discussion throughout the humanities and social sciences. The essays in this volume provide a comprehensive overview of Foucault's major themes and texts, from his early work on madness through his history of sexuality. Special attention is also paid to thinkers and movements, from Kant through current feminist theory, that are particularly important for understanding his work and its impact. This revised edition contains five new essays and revisions of many others, and the extensive bibliography has been updated.
The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon is a reference tool that provides clear and incisive definitions and descriptions of all of Foucault's major terms and influences, including history, knowledge, language, philosophy and power. It also includes entries on philosophers about whom Foucault wrote and who influenced Foucault's thinking, such as Deleuze, Heidegger, Nietzsche and Canguilhem. The entries are written by scholars of Foucault from a variety of disciplines such as philosophy, gender studies, political science and history. Together, they shed light on concepts key to Foucault and to ongoing discussions of his work today.
A comprehensive guide to Foucault, from his early work on madness to his history of sexuality.
An introduction to the critical interpretation of the work of Michael Foucault.
Contributes to Foucauldian scholarship by contextualizing Foucault's key concepts and identifying current and emerging applications of his work.
Michel Foucault was one of the twentieth century's most influential and provocative thinkers. His work on freedom, subjectivity, and power is now central to thinking across an extraordinarily wide range of disciplines, including philosophy, history, education, psychology, politics, anthropology, sociology, and criminology. "Michel Foucault: Key Concepts" explores Foucault's central ideas, such as disciplinary power, biopower, bodies, spirituality, and practices of the self. Each essay focuses on a specific concept, analyzing its meaning and uses across Foucault's work, highlighting its connection to other concepts, and emphasizing its potential applications. Together, the chapters provide the main co-ordinates to map Foucault's work. But more than a guide to the work, "Michel Foucault: Key Concepts" introduces readers to Foucault's thinking, equipping them with a set of tools that can facilitate and enhance further study.
This book is designed to serve two purposes. First it provides an introduction to the ideas and works of Michel Foucault. It should be particularly appropriate for education students for whom, in general, Foucault is a shadowy presence. Second, it provides a Foucault based critique of a central plank of Western liberal education, the notion of the autonomous individual or personal autonomy. There are several introductions to Foucault but they tend to be written from a particular theoretical position, or with a particular interest in Foucault's ideas and works. For example Smart (1986) and Poster (1984) exemplify the former, and Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983) the latter. There is no substantial work in education on Foucault, apart from Ball (1990), which is an edited collection of papers by educationalists. The writer started reading Foucault from a position in education which was in the liberal framework, somewhere between Dewey, Freire and Habermas, but with an interest in punishment, authority and power. The book is the outcome of several years of trying to introduce students in education to his ideas and works in an educationally relevant manner. But an introduction, on its own, cannot show this relevance to education. Unless his ideas are put to work, unless they are used as opposed to mentioned in some sphere or area of education, then they may be of little relevance.
When one defines "order" as a sorting of priorities, it becomes beautifully clear as to what Foucault is doing here. With virtuoso showmanship, he weaves an intensely complex history of thought. He dips into literature, art, economics and even biology in The Order of Things, possibly one of the most significant, yet most overlooked, works of the twentieth century. Eclipsed by his later work on power and discourse, nonetheless it was The Order of Things that established Foucault's reputation as an intellectual giant. Pirouetting around the outer edge of language, Foucault unsettles the surface of literary writing. In describing the limitations of our usual taxonomies, he opens the door onto a whole new system of thought, one ripe with what he calls "exotic charm". Intellectual pyrotechnics from the master of critical thinking, this book is crucial reading for those who wish to gain insight into that odd beast called Postmodernism, and a must for any fan of Foucault.
In his renowned courses at the Collège de France from 1982 to 1984, Michel Foucault devoted his lectures to meticulous readings and interpretations of the works of Plato, Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius, among others. In this his aim was not, Edward F. McGushin contends, to develop a new knowledge of the history of philosophy; rather, it was to let himself be transformed by the very activity of thinking. Thus, this work shows us Foucault in the last phase of his life in the act of becoming a philosopher. Here we see how his encounter with ancient philosophy allowed him to experience the practice of philosophy as, to paraphrase Nietzsche, a way of becoming who one is: the work of self-formation that the Greeks called askēsis. Through a detailed study of Foucault's last courses, McGushin demonstrates that this new way of practicing philosophical askēsis evokes Foucault's ethical resistance to modern relations of power and knowledge. In order to understand Foucault's later project, then, it is necessary to see it within the context of his earlier work. If his earlier projects represented an attempt to bring to light the relations of power and knowledge that narrowed and limited freedom, then this last project represents his effort to take back that freedom by redefining it in terms of care of the self. Foucault always stressed that modern power functions by producing individual subjects. This book shows how his excavation of ancient philosophical practices gave him the tools to counter this function-with a practice of self-formation, an askēsis.