In its technical use, “Dasein” picks out an entity, initially the entity “which each of us is himself and which includes inquiring as one of the possibilities of its being” (SZ 27). This entity provided the proximate focus for Heidegger’s way into renewing the question of the sense of being, through a “preparatory existential analytic of Dasein” (SZ 65).

Michel Foucault wrote extensively about historical reconfigurations of knowledge in what would now be called the human sciences. During the 1970s, however, he argued (most notably in Discipline and Punish [DP] and the first volume of The History of Sexuality [HS]) that these reorganizations of knowledge were also intertwined with new forms of power and domination. Foucault's works from this period have often yielded contradictory responses from readers. His detailed historical remarks on the emergence of disciplinary and regulatory biopower have been widely influential. Yet these detailed studies are connected to a more general conception of power, and of the epistemic and political positioning of the criticism of power, which many critics have found less satisfactory. Foucault's discussions of the relation between truth and power have similarly provoked concerns about their reflexive implications for his own analysis.

The principal purpose of this essay is to offer a sympathetic interpretation of the understanding of power and of knowledge that informs Foucault’s historical studies of prisons and of the construction of a scientific discourse about sexuality. Since Foucault discussed power in this period rather more thematically than he did knowledge, my discussion of knowledge will build extensively upon his remarks about power. The essay will proceed in three parts. First I will briefly recapitulate Foucault’s account of the interconnected emergence of new forms of power and knowledge in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty is best known as a philosopher of science for his detailed investigations of psychology. Perhaps because of this, the significance of his work for a broader philosophical reflection on science has been overlooked, but Merleau-Ponty intended his work as a general investigation of the epistemological and ontological status of meaning and structure. The structures discovered through research in solid-state physics or molecular biology must be included within the scope of his inquiry as much as the more primary perceptual structures of color or visual depth. It is true he often insisted that science cannot account for or understand a particular phenomenon and went on to contrast his phenomenological discoveries with the inadequate analyses produced by science. When Merleau-Ponty spoke of “science” in this way, however, he used the term interchangeably with “objective thought.” The task remains to show that scientific investigation can also be freed from the traditional prejudices of objective thought and exhibited as a mode of human existence. Merleau-Ponty was admittedly ambivalent about this possibility, and he rarely thematized scientific research in the course of his investigations. The aim of this chapter, however, is to develop an existential conception of science within the context of Merleau-Ponty’s work. It seems clear to me that his project cannot be completed unless it incorporates science, and not just the body and the perceived world, poetry and history, painting and love.

The pragmatist tradition, with which Richard Rorty actively aligns himself, has long been closely affiliated with the sciences. Pragmatists such as John Dewey or Willard van Orman Quine have understood themselves to be philosophical naturalists, where “naturalism” is defined as the view that philosophy is continuous with, or even a part of, a scientific understanding of the world. The significance of such a proposed assimilation of philosophy to science depends, however, upon the specific conception of science and scientific understanding that philosophy is supposed to emulate. An important and controversial aspect of Rorty's own contribution to pragmatism has been his reformulation of the terms in which we should understand the sciences and the scientific culture that the pragmatists endorse.

Rorty's conception of science, along with his view of the relations of science to philosophy and to culture more generally, has evolved in conversation with philosophical debates about scientific realism, and about a broader conception of scientific “objectivity” that scientific realism exemplifies. Part of the difficulty of getting a handle on these arguments, and on Rorty's own position, is that the term “realism” has been fraught with ambiguity. Sometimes it has been used simply to assert continuity between the familiar objects of our everyday surroundings and the strange and often unobservable objects postulated within scientific theories (electrons and black holes are just as real as tables and chairs).

The opening sentence of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is often thought to be prophetic. Kuhn proclaimed that “history of science … could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed” (1970, p. 1). In the decade or so after the book was published in 1962, the dominant philosophical conception of science, logical empiricism, was indeed substantially transformed. Moreover, although Kuhn's book at the time was only one among a half dozen prominent challenges to logical empiricism, it has in retrospect become the symbol for its own revolution, marking a transition to a postempiricist era in the philosophy of science. Citations of Kuhn are now ubiquitous in various contrasts between the supposedly bad old days and some more enlightened present conception of science.

Proclamations of revolution are often succeeded by revisionist debunking. That fate may well befall Kuhn's book. In the past decade or so, a number of scholars have convincingly called attention to important continuities between Kuhn's book and the work of his logical empiricist predecessors. Others note that Kuhn and his most sympathetic readers have repudiated the most radical-sounding claims associated with the book. In a still different vein, one scholar has argued that Kuhn's book was reactionary rather than revolutionary: Fuller (1999) claims both that Kuhn aimed to insulate science from public scrutiny and democratic control, and that, contrary to its public image, the philosophical and social scientific work most influenced by Kuhn has had just that effect.

Michel Foucault wrote extensively about historical reconfigurations of knowledge in what would now be called the human sciences. During the 1970s, however, he argued (most notably in Discipline and Punish and the first volume of The History of Sexuality) that these reorganizations of knowledge also constituted new forms of power and domination. Foucault's works from this period have often generated contradictory responses from readers. His detailed historical remarks on the emergence of disciplinary and regulatory bio-power have been widely influential. Yet these detailed studies are connected to a more general conception of power, and of the epistemic and political positioning of the criticism of power, which many critics have found less satisfactory. Foucault's discussions of the relation between truth and power have similarly provoked concerns about their reflexive implications for his own analysis.

The principal purpose of this essay is to offer a sympathetic interpretation of the understanding of power and of knowledge that informs Foucault's historical studies of prisons and of the construction of a scientific discourse about sexuality. Since Foucault discussed power in this period rather more thematically than he did knowledge, my discussion of knowledge will build extensively upon his remarks about power. The essay will proceed in three parts. First I will briefly recapitulate Foucault's account of the intertwined emergence of new forms of power and knowledge in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The second part will initiate my reflections upon the concepts of “power” and “knowledge” with a critical discussion of political and epistemic sovereignty.