Abstract

 The year 2013 marked the 50th anniversary of the publication of a classic of the historiography of sciences, Michel Foucault’s The birth of the clinic: An archaeology of medical gaze. In different parts of the world, events were organized to reflect on this important work. The article argues that if one cannot draw a direct line linking the work of the leading historians-philosophers of the twentieth-century sciences in France to Michel Foucault’s archaeological study of the clinic, we must recognize that the author of The Birth of the Clinic has taken up from these historians-philosophers the methodological and conceptual tools that made it possible to study the history of science and knowledge in a new way.
Highlights
Michel Foucault has painted a masterful picture of French style in the history of sciences: The history of sciences avails itself of one of the themes which was introduced almost surreptitiously into late eighteenth-century philosophy: for the first time rational thought was put into question as to its nature, its foundation, its powers and its rights, and as to its history and its geography; as to its immediate past and its present reality; as to its time and its place
In France it is the history of sciences which has above all served to support the philosophical question of the Enlightenment: after all, the positivism of Comte and his successors was one way of us once again taking up the questioning by Mendelssohn and Kant on the scale of a general history of societies
Knowledge and belief; the scientific form of knowledge and the religious contents of representation; or the transition from the pre-scientific to scientific, the constitution of a rational way of knowing on the basis of traditional experience; the appearance, in the midst of a history of ideas and beliefs, of a type of history suitable to scientific knowledge; the origin and threshold of rationality – it is under this form, through positivism [...] that the question of the Enlightenment was brought into France [...]
Summary
Michel Foucault has painted a masterful picture of French style in the history of sciences: The history of sciences avails itself of one of the themes which was introduced almost surreptitiously into late eighteenth-century philosophy: for the first time rational thought was put into question as to its nature, its foundation, its powers and its rights, and as to its history and its geography; as to its immediate past and its present reality; as to its time and its place. Works such as those of Koyré, Bachelard or Canguilhem could have had as their centers of reference precise, “regional”, logically well-defined domains in the history of sciences, but they have functioned as important centers of philosophical elaboration to the extent that, under different facets, they set into play this question of the Enlightenment which is essential to contemporary philosophy (Foucault, 1978, 9 IX-X; Foucault, 1994, 431-432).
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