teaching foucault

While the bibliographic suggestions have been many and thoughtful, I wonder how
useful they will be for very advanced high school students and first-year
university students. It seems to me that the contribution Foucault makes to a
"history of science" is the critique of the evolutionary model and the
understanding that "science" is a method inherently objective. It has been my
experience that teenagers find Foucault's concept absolutely startling or "just
too weird." My best success has come with using the narratives and focusing
on a FEW of the basic concepts--epistemes, what is an author?, disciplinarity.
I would contextualize Foucault with historical incidents that exemplify the
discursive formations he identifies. There are a wealth in the Royal Society's
Philosophical Transactions--the experiments on blood transfusions come to mind,
but also Newton's suppressed second book of the Principia, or the Mary Toft
(rabbit-lady) affair of the mid-1720s.
Maja-Lisa von Sneidern, U. of Arizona


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