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?
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, he says, is his preoccupation with what counts as knowledge.
Susan James, welcome to philosophy bites.
Thank you.
It's very nice to be here.
The topic we're going to focus on is Foucault and knowledge.
Just before we get onto knowledge, could you say something about who Foucault was?
Foucault 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 Sweden and Poland.
Later on, he lived for a bit in Tunisia, but he came back and worked at the University of Clermont Ferrand.
He was the person who set up the department of philosophy at the University of Vincennes in the late sixties, where he organized an amazing and revolutionary department of some of the greatest young philosophers of his time.