The Invention of Man: An Assessment of Foucault’s Analysis of the Human Sciences in The Order of Things

The aim of this thesis is to explore Michel Foucault’s understanding and analysis of the human sciences as found in The Order of Things, through his famous formula that ‘man is an invention of recent date’. It will centre in particular on the last chapters of the book, ‘Man and his Doubles’ and ‘The Human Sciences’, since they deal with the appearance of the human (and social) sciences which take man as their object of study. I received an education in the social sciences, and so the opportunity to study them through philosophy allows me to build a bridge between these two different, but at the same time, close domains of Western knowledge. Philosophy and the social sciences have a lot in common, particularly their shared interest in man as object as well as subject of study. This is this duality (subject/object) that Foucault referred to as a strange ‘empirico-transcendental doublet’. And it is on this unstable ground that, according to Foucault, modern knowledge constituted itself at the articulation between the 18th and the 19th centuries, from where the social sciences, as we know them today, emerged. In this thesis, I wish to show why the Foucauldian conception of man is important in his understanding of the nature of the human and social sciences, and how this understanding brings an interesting (but controversial) insight into the actual situation as well as possible transformation of Western knowledge.