ABSTRACT
Michel Foucault is a stimulating, controversial and elusive scholar. In some ways Foucault's intellectual adventure is as much an aesthetic exercise in self-formation as it is an analytical programme. While Foucault's significance as a social theorist is undisputed, his importance for education and as an educationalist is relatively underdeveloped. For Foucault, critique is the point and organising principle of philosophy, as an attitude or philosophical ethos and a form of engagement that combines outrage with limit-testing and careful scholarship. Foucault's genealogy consists of a refusal of continuities and of organising principles to history which asserts that there is no ‘timeless and essential secret’ to be uncovered by history, indeed Foucault says, this is an ‘adolescent quest’. Both archaeology and genealogy address in their different but related ways the question of truth. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
