Response to Colin Koopman’s “Historical Critique or Transcendental Critique in Foucault

In Historical Critique or Transcendental Critique in Foucault: Two Kantian Lineages *hereafter, HCTC+, Colin Koopman offers an important contribution to the on-going discussion of Foucault's historical methodology. His account takes its point of departure from a strident critique of recent efforts that have, in varying ways, sought to establish that Foucault's work is rooted in the transcendental phenomenological tradition. Koopman argues that this interpretative strategy fails on textual as well as conceptual grounds. Moreover, consideration of these issues, Koopman contends, compels a reading of Foucault's turn to genealogy and problematization as the development of a unique form of non-transcendental (yet still Kantian) critique, what Koopman calls pragmatic genealogy. One of the versions of the phenomenological interpretation of Foucault against which Koopman argues is one that I have proposed and sought to defend. 1 In what follows, I offer a response to Koopman's critique. In particular, I seek to show that it is flawed in two ways: (1) the main thrust of the proposed criticism is textually misguided, and (2) the conceptual issue, which leads to Koopman's alternative account of Foucault's method, is rendered more, rather than less, problematic precisely by his rejection of the phenomenological reading

Epistemology · Transcendental number · Transcendental philosophy · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · Philosophy

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