This is

This is Philosophy Bites with me Nigel Warburton and me David Edmonds

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Here's a philosophical quiz question.

What do sex, power, punishment and madness have in common?

Answer, they're all topics of books written by the prolific 20th century French philosopher Michel Foucault.

Susan James teaches at Birkbeck College and is fascinated by Foucault.

A theme that runs through Foucault's work, she says, is his preoccupation with what counts as knowledge.

Susan James, welcome to Philosophy Bides.

Thank you. It's very nice to be here.

The topic we're going to focus on is FUCO and knowledge.

Just before we get on to knowledge, could you say something about who FUCO was?

FUCO was a French philosopher. He was born in Poitiers in the 1920s and he died at the age of 58 in 1984, so not a very long life. He was educated in Paris, and then subsequently had an interesting

sort of career, some of it being a regular academic in France, and some of it being a kind of cultural diplomat in

in Sweden and Poland later on he lived for a bit in Tunisia. But he came back and worked at the University of Clermont.

He was the person who set up the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vancen in the late 60s, where he organized

an amazing and revolutionary department of some of the greatest young philosophers of his time.

Then he became in 1970 or so, so in his mid-40s, a professor at the College of France,

pretty grand thing to become in French cultural life and that's where he stayed,

giving a series of public lectures each year as you have to, and at the same time during the 1970s becoming a sort of

...