Abstract

This book addresses Foucault’s characterizations of the Enlightenment, asking whether the developmental history of the modern conception of knowledge--from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment--warrants the conclusion he draws. From the perspective of a critical evaluation of Foucault's thesis on "the crisis of modernity," the book examines whether Foucault, the philosophical and social critic, truly belongs to those intellectual trends known as a "deconstruction" and "post-modernism" that advocate a wholesale rejection of the project of modernity, demonstrating how a classification of this kind contributes to an impoverishment of our understanding of Foucault's thought