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Essay on Michel Foucault's Birth of a Clinic
Michel Foucault can be viewed as a sociologist of knowledge, and at the same time as an historian and as a philosopher. Such representations seem plausible given Foucault's self chosen title of the Chair he occupied at the College de France as the "Professor of the History of Systems of Thought." His central works comprise studies of the emergence of phenomena, events, and processes that have come to be seen as taken-for-granted within the history of European culture. Among his earlier works one was concerned with the history of madness during the Classical age, and another with the birth of a discourse of clinical medicine during the late eighteenth century. In the 1960s he wrote on the human sciences and the nature of knowledge. (Lash S, 1984)
In the 1970s he presented a history of the prison and of new modes of discipline as they occurred in the nineteenth century. Later in the 1970s he wrote on the history of sexuality to oppose the idea that sexuality reveals some "deep truth" about the self and to expose the fallacy of the view that the human sciences are concerned with uncovering rather than constructing the objects of their domain. In an important sense Foucault's work seeks to uncover not the development of rationality, but the ways new forms of control and power are legitimated by complex discourses that stake a claim to rationality and that are embedded in diverse institutional sites. (Barry A., Osbourne T., & Rose N, 1996)
Foucault's lasting contribution is as an historian and a philosopher of science, though not of the sort who can be neatly labeled in terms of disciplinary home, but rather a scholar who defies neat intellectual classification and who rejects the institutional basis of disciplinary affiliation. Although his works can be considered histories by virtue of their objects and temporal reference..............
