ABSTRACT
Over the last twenty years, Michel Foucault has produced a body of historical-philosophical work of great significance. In a series of remarkable books, he has undertaken a bold reinterpretation of Western Society since the Renaissance. As a result of its sweeping scope and penetrating analyses, his work has been the focus of a great deal of attention and controversy. It is Hacking’s explicit purpose to force a somewhat unwilling Anglo-American audience to take Foucault seriously as a philosopher. Hacking feels that analytic philosophers have a good deal to learn about the structure of certain fields of knowledge from Foucault, but he also recognizes that there is much in Foucault’s work that would put them off. Hacking’s strategy, then, for making Foucault’s work palatable to analytic philosophers is to find a place on the analytic philosophic landscape for it to occupy.
