20th century · 1926–1984
Who influenced Michel Foucault?
Influences and legacy
Traced power through prisons, clinics, and sexuality — knowledge is never innocent.
Michel Foucault was influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger and Louis Althusser, and went on to influence Edward Said. That is 4 lines of the 448 documented lines of influence between the 279 thinkers on this map.
Read on Wikipedia Portrait: Jerry Bauer, Public domain See the whole map
Who was Michel Foucault?
Michel Foucault studied the ties between power, knowledge and liberty and the way institutions use them for social control. Born in Poitiers, he studied at the École Normale Supérieure under Jean Hyppolite and Louis Althusser and took degrees in philosophy and psychology. His first major book was The History of Madness (1961), followed by The Birth of the Clinic and The Order of Things, early examples of the method he called archaeology.
From 1970 until his death he held a chair at the Collège de France. Discipline and Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality (1976) added a genealogical method focused on the role of power. He rejected the labels structuralist and postmodernist. He was the first public figure in France to die of AIDS, and his partner Daniel Defert founded the charity AIDES in his memory.
Summarized from the lead of the Wikipedia article.
Who influenced Michel Foucault?
3 direct influences on this map, earliest first.
- Friedrich Nietzsche 1844–1900
- Martin Heidegger 1889–1976
- Louis Althusser 1918–1990
Who did Michel Foucault influence?
1 thinker on this map draws directly on Michel Foucault.
- Edward Said 1935–2003
The line of teachers behind Michel Foucault
The longest documented line of influence ending at Michel Foucault runs 26 generations back, to Thales of Miletus.
- Thales of Miletus
- Anaximenes of Miletus
- Anaxagoras
- Socrates
- Antisthenes
- Diogenes of Sinope
- Crates of Thebes
- Zeno of Citium
- Seneca
- Tertullian
- Augustine of Hippo
- Anselm of Canterbury
- Peter Lombard
- Thomas Aquinas
- René Descartes
- Thomas Hobbes
- Baruch Spinoza
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
- Christian Wolff
- Immanuel Kant
- Johann Gottlieb Fichte
- F. W. J. Schelling
- Georg W. F. Hegel
- Max Stirner
- Friedrich Nietzsche
- Martin Heidegger
- Michel Foucault
Two steps away from Michel Foucault
Indirect influences
Contemporaries of Michel Foucault
Thinkers on this map born within 25 years of Michel Foucault, with no direct line between them.
- Hilary Putnam 1926–2016
- Gilles Deleuze 1925–1995
- Frantz Fanon 1925–1961
- Niklas Luhmann 1927–1998
- Michael Dummett 1925–2011
- Jürgen Habermas 1929–2026
- Alasdair MacIntyre 1929–2025
- Bernard Williams 1929–2003
Michel Foucault by the numbers
- Direct influences
- 3
- Direct followers
- 1
- Thinkers upstream
- 115
- Thinkers downstream
- 1
- Wikipedia languages
- 96 — #12 of 84 among 20th-century philosophers
- Card rarity
- Epic
Questions about Michel Foucault
- Who influenced Michel Foucault?
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger and Louis Althusser.
- Who did Michel Foucault influence?
- Edward Said.
- When did Michel Foucault live?
- 1926–1984. The map files Michel Foucault under the 20th century.
- How rare is the Michel Foucault card?
- Wikipedia carries an article on Michel Foucault in 96 languages, which makes it an Epic card. Legendary starts at 100 languages, Epic at 50 and Rare at 25.
More 20th-century philosophers
- Jean-Paul Sartre 1905–1980
- Albert Camus 1913–1960
- Max Weber 1864–1920
- Simone de Beauvoir 1908–1986
- Bertrand Russell 1872–1970
- Ludwig Wittgenstein 1889–1951
- Martin Heidegger 1889–1976
- Umberto Eco 1932–2016