ABSTRACT
Michel Foucault has high praise for the critical tradition that emerges from Immanuel Kant’s historical-political reflections on the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Kant’s concern in these writings with “an ontology of the present, an ontology of ourselves” is, he says, characteristic of “a form of philosophy, from Hegel, through Nietzsche and Max Weber, to the Frankfurt School,” a form of philosophy in which Foucault, perhaps surprisingly, situates his own work. Foucault’s first extended discussion of Kant occurs in his these complementaire, which consisted of a translation into French of Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View and a substantial introduction to the text. In the tension between the empirical and the transcendental, which Foucault claims is both at the core of Kant’s Anthropology and at the core of his critical philosophy as a whole, Foucault sees “the problematic of contemporary philosophy”.
