ABSTRACT
In a lecture held in 1983 at the college de France, Michel Foucault made a beautiful response to an article written two hundred years earlier by Immanuel Kant (1784). In Foucault’s view, Kant was the first philosopher who raised issues about the difference between the past and the present. For Kant this difference lay in a certain self-reflectiveness of the Enlightenment and modernity, introduced by the events of the French Revolution. Using his reason, Kant argued, Man could liberate himself from self-imposed constraints on his freedom.
