ABSTRACT
The continental tradition had not sought to eliminate the discipline of philosophy, in other words, though it criticized the current state of philosophy. Philosophy's only proper task is to dismantle itself. By detailed, case by case exercises, Ludwig Wittgenstein hoped to untangle those "knots of thought" found in traditional philosophical quandaries that are generated largely by the misuse and misunderstanding of what are ordinary and even prosaic features of language. John Stuart Mill, reflecting upon Hume's empiricist attack on the same kind of Platonic realism, coined the term "natural kinds" for whatever categories limn reality rather than impose an arbitrary classification. The resulting book is an intoxicating mixture of philosophical speculations, expositions of economics, biology, and linguistics in that impressionistic manner, and prophetic Nietzschean pronouncements concerning the "death of man" and the "naked experience of order". The Archaeology of Knowledge is Michel Foucault's only sustained attempt at careful philosophical discussion, though it aims of course to dismiss philosophy.
