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Journal of Medicine and Philosophy Advance Access originally published online on June 22, 2009
Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 2009 34(4):328-349; doi:10.1093/jmp/jhp027
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press, on behalf of the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy Inc. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Foucauldian Diagnostics: Space, Time, and the Metaphysics of Medicine

Jeffrey P. Bishop

Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Nashville, Tennessee, USA

Address correspondence to: Jeffrey P. Bishop, MD, Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society, Vanderbilt University, 2525 West End Ave., 4th Floor, Suite 400, Nashville, TN 37203, USA. E-mail: jeffrey.bishop{at}Vanderbilt.Edu


  Abstract

This essay places Foucault's work into a philosophical context, recognizing that Foucault is difficult to place and demonstrates that Foucault remains in the Kantian tradition of philosophy, even if he sits at the margins of that tradition. For Kant, the forms of intuition—space and time—are the a priori conditions of the possibility of human experience and knowledge. For Foucault, the a priori conditions are political space and historical time. Foucault sees political space as central to understanding both the subject and objects of medicine, psychiatry, and the social sciences. Through this analysis one can see that medicine's metaphysics is a metaphysics of efficient causation, where medicine's objects are subjected to mechanisms of efficient control.

Keywords: Foucault, Kant, metaphysics, space


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J. P. Bishop
Revisiting Foucault
J Med Philos, August 1, 2009; 34(4): 323 - 327.
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