Each volume of this series of companions to major philosophers contains specially commissioned essays by an international team of scholars, together with a substantial bibliography, and will serve as a reference work for students and non-specialists. One aim of the series is to dispel the intimidation such readers often feel when faced with the work of a difficult and challenging thinker. Michel Foucault, one of the most important of contemporary French thinkers, exerted a profound influence on philosophy, history, and social theory. Foucault attempted to reveal the historical contingency of ideas that present themselves as necessary truths. He carried out this project in a series of original and strikingly controversial studies on the origins of modern medical and social scientific disciplines. These studies have raised fundamental philosophical questions about the nature of knowledge and its relation to power structures that have become major topics of discussion throughout the humanities and social sciences.

Introduction. Michel Foucault : a user's manual / Gary Gutting --
Foucault's mapping of history / Thomas Flynn --
Foucault and the history of madness / Gary Gutting --
The death of man, or exhaustion of the cogito? / George Canguilhem ; translated by Catherine Porter --
Power/knowledge / Joseph Rouse --
Ethics as ascetics : Foucault, the history of ethics, and ancient thought / Arnold I. Davidson --
The ethics of Michel Foucault / James W. Bernauer, Michael Mahon --
"What is enlightenment?" : Kant according to Foucault / Christopher Norris --
Modern and countermodern : ethos and epoch in Heidegger and Foucault / Paul Rabinow --
Foucault and Habermas on the subject of reason / David Ingram --
"Between tradition and oblivion" : Foucault, the complications of form, the literatures of reason, and the aesthetics of existence / Stephen Watson --
Foucault, feminism and questions of identity / Jana Sawicki --
Foucault, Michel, 1926- / "Maurice Florence" ; translated by Catherine Porter.