51242672 David Hyder Foucault Cavailles and Husserl on the Historical Epistemology of the Sciences

Foucault, Cavaillès, andHusserl on the HistoricalEpistemology of theSciences

David HyderUniversity of Constance

This paper discusses the origins of two key notions in Foucault’s work up toand including The Archaeology of Knowledge. The �rst of these notionsis the notion of “archaeology” itself, a form of historical investigation ofknowledge that is distinguished from the mere history of ideas in part by itsunearthing what Foucault calls “historical a prioris”. Both notions, I argue,are derived from Husserlian phenomenology. But both are modi�ed byFoucault in the light of Jean Cavaillès’s critique of Husserl’s theory of sci-ence. On Husserl’s view, we demand that propositions holding of scienti�c ob-jects be intersubjective and invariant, but this demand con�icts with our im-mediate experience, which is essentially bound to a subject’s perspective. Thusthe mathematical and physical sciences must utilise formal languages to �xthese truths independently of the thoughts of a particular subject. This neces-sary procedure leads to the sedimentation of these formal systems: we forgettheir source in the concrete experiences of individuals, and use them as purelytechnical means. The technique of reactivating the intentional acts in whichsedimented formal systems originated is thus, in Fink’s terminology, an ar-chaeological method. Foucault and Cavaillès retain the general outlines ofthis archaeology of the sciences, but they reject its appeal to conscious acts ofmeaning, to what Cavaillès calls “the philosophy of consciousness” . I concludeby discussing the implicit dif�culties in the “linguistic transcendentalism”proposed as an alternative by these French critics of Husserl.

Most readers of Foucault are eventually struck by a methodologicalcon�ict in his work: while Foucault is adamant that systems of knowledgeare constituted within social contexts and maintained by power relations,

My thanks to Ian Hacking, Alan Poskow, Holger Sturm, Dieter Teichert, and to an anony-mous referee for comments on earlier versions of this paper.

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he is equally convinced of the need for theoretical critiques of the historyof knowledge such as his own. Such critiques are not intended to be posi-tivist history; rather they have the unmistakably normative aim of freeingus of certain contingent and undesirable features of our (scienti�c) patri-mony. In Anglo-American terms, Foucault walks like a socialconstructivist, but he often talks like a normative philosopher. By conven-tional measures, the methods of these schools are incompatible, and this isno doubt one reason that Anglo-American readers have tended to damn orto praise Foucault for his relativist leanings.1 Either they overlook the nor-mative aims of his work, or they simply ignore the tension betweenconstructivist means and normative ends.

My purpose in this paper is to explicate the sources of this seeming in-consistency by analysing two key notions in Foucault’s early work, bywhich I mean his writings up to and including The Archaeology of Knowl-edge. The �rst of these notions is the notion of “archaeology” itself, a formof historical investigation of knowledge that is distinguished from themere history of ideas in part by its unearthing what Foucault calls “histor-ical a prioris.” This concept is the second of the two I will be concernedwith. Such historical a prioris, on Foucault’s account, are “unconscious”matrices governing the space of possible statements [énoncés] that occur inthe writings of a given historical age. They are conceived simultaneouslyas conditions on the knowledge of a given scienti�c culture, and as theframework that historians and philosophers use to classify the writings ofthe age they are studying. Both notions, I shall argue, are derived fromHusserlian phenomenology. But both are modi�ed by Foucault in thelight of Jean Cavaillès’s critique of Husserl’s theory of science, according towhich not only Husserl, but also most logicist philosophers of science andmathematics, are laboring under Kantian, “transcendentalist” delusions.

According to Cavaillès, transcendentalist philosophies of science seekto justify logical and methodological norms by deriving them from foun-dational acts of consciousness. This approach is easily discerned in Kant:in the �rst Critique, the normative authority of logic and mathematics isboth explained and justi�ed by revealing their origins in those faculties ofthe mind whose operations are conditions for the possibility of uni�ed andconscious experience. Drawing on his work on the history and philosophyof mathematics, Cavaillès argues that Kant and his successors, above allHusserl, are unable to account for the evolution of modern logic andmathematics on this scheme. Husserl, for instance, extends the transcen-dentalist program fundamentally by focusing on the role of intentionality.

108 Foucault, Cavaillès, and Husserl on the Historical Epistemology of the Sciences

1. See Norris’s criticisms of Rorty’s interpretation of Foucault in (Norris 1994,pp. 162–166).

Already in his earliest writings on mathematics and logic, he seeks to ex-plain the normative character of these sciences by means of a phenomeno-logical analysis of original intentional acts. Geometry, for instance, con-cerns “ideal” mathematical objects, such as triangles. These ideal objectscan be the objects of intentions only to the extent that such intentions aresystematically developed out of more quotidian ones concerning immedi-ate spatio-temporal experiences. Such a process of idealization is not, how-ever, fundamentally different from that involved in the objecti�cationof other objects of experience. For instance, we also constitute a three-dimensional tree standing behind our immediate perceptions by imagin-ing the tree viewed from multiple points of view. In both cases (the treeand the triangle), the objecti�cation of the object goes hand in hand withcertain constitutive operations of consciousness, which operations are theconditions on our establishing intentions regarding trees and triangles. Aphenomenological investigation lays bare the normative content implicitin our intentional states by analyzing such primitive constitutive acts.Such acts are, as in Kant, the acts of a single, conscious subject.

I will not have occasion to go into Cavaillès’s objections to logicism andthe work of the Vienna Circle at any length in this paper; however, it isworth touching on the parallels he sees between Husserl’s and their work.Logicist theories of mathematics seek to reduce the content of mathemati-cal propositions to logical truths. For both Frege and Wittgenstein, thisanalysis requires a further de�nition of these logical truths, and in bothcases this de�nition presumes the existence of prior and structured mean-ings, for instance Frege’s third realm of senses, or Wittgenstein’s logicalspace. In order for the reduction to do any work, these structures must beassumed as given, for otherwise the scope of the phrase “logical truth”would not be well-de�ned, and thus the point of the reduction would benulli�ed. That is to say, if the principles of logic could not be identi�ed apriori, then we might have to introduce supplementary logical principlesas we moved along. And in such a case the claim that mathematics was insome sense reducible to logic would at the very least lose its persuasiveforce.2 Traditional logicism, on Cavaillès’s reading, founds the authority oflogic by invoking the prior existence of meaningful symbols, and to itscredit offers more than a merely formal justi�cation of logical laws. Laterversions, such as that of Carnap, abandon this presupposition, however

Perspectives on Science 109

2. One need only think of Wittgenstein’s repeated criticisms of Principia Mathematica,according to which the inadequacyof Whitehead’s and Russell’s theory of logic is made ev-ident by their repeated introduction of supplementary, supposedly logical axioms.Wittgenstein’s de�nition of a “tautology” is supposed to provide an independent criterionfor distinguishing properly logical propositions; however, his de�nition presupposes aclosed set of bivalent elementary propositions.

they do so at the cost of making logic part of mathematics—thus of aban-doning the initial reductive project.3

Cavaillès is opposed to all these theories of science and mathematics,and proposes in their stead what he calls a “philosophy of the concept,”which is a philosophy that tries to understand the sciences by examiningthe history of concepts and the norms that govern their use. Such an ap-proach is to be distinguished from its transcendentalist foils in that it doesnot demand or expect the closure that transcendentalism cannot do with-out. It does not, in other words, imagine that the ground of normativerules is to be found by revealing hidden cognitive structures, or whatHusserl calls “sedimented” cognitive acts. Cavaillès complains that allsuch theories inevitably lead to the result that there cannot really be any-thing unexpected in science: the real objects with which science is con-cerned can never penetrate the fabric of cognition, because the latter mustscreen the real world precisely in order that it may appear as the source ofnorms. Transcendentalism, on this view, is constitutionally opposed to re-alism, and it also cannot admit any real developments in scienti�c meth-odology.

It is, I shall be suggesting, just this critique of transcendentalism thatprovides the philosophical background to Foucault’s early work. For ex-ample, in his contribution to an issue of the Revue de Métaphysique et de Mo-rale dedicated to George Canguilhem’s work, Foucault gives a brief sum-mary of the state of French philosophy and history of science in the periodafter the war. In an oft-cited passage,4 he suggests that there was a funda-mental division cutting across the series of more easily recognizable cleav-ages between Marxists and anti-Marxists, Freudians and anti-Freudians,etc., namely the opposition between a philosophy of the subject, of con-sciousness, and a philosophy of knowledge, “of the concept” as he puts it.5


3. See Cavaillès’s 1938 monograph, Méthode axiomatique et formalisme (Cavaillès 1981,pp. 165–169).

4. See, for instance, Gutting (1989, pp. 9–12). Gutting takes this passage as his pointof departure for a discussion of the theories and methodologies of Bachelard andCanguilhem. Without in any way calling into question the value of his approach (for herightly emphasises Foucault’s debts within the French tradition of the history of scienti�cconcepts), I am obviously more sceptical regarding the accuracy of Foucault’s description.Put otherwise, while Gutting follows Foucault in viewing this French tradition as an alter-native response to Kant’s question “What is Enlightenment?” I am claiming in this essaythat Foucault was not able to engage in this alternative critique without covertly borrow-ing from the transcendental larder. Quite evidently, Foucault’s relation to his teachers is farmore important when one considers the speci�c “archaeologies” that he develops.

5. Reprinted as (Foucault 1994b, pp. 764–765). This article is a redaction of the origi-nal version of the preface Foucault had provided for the English translation of Canguil-hem’s The Normal and the Pathological.

This division �ltered the reception of Husserlian phenomenology inFrance, with the result that Husserl’s thought was reworked on the subjec-tivist side by authors such as Sartre and Merleau-Ponty into the existentialphilosophy, whereas the conceptualists—among whom he includesBachelard, Canguilhem, Cavaillès, and himself—were more interested inHusserl’s early works on the philosophy of science and mathematics.

As I have just indicated, the term “philosophy of the concept” is intro-duced by Cavaillès during his critique of Husserl’s “inordinate use ofthe subject” in the latter’s �nal work, The Crisis of the European Sciences. Theresearch program that both Cavaillès and Foucault mean to describewith this term is, one might say, empirically rich but philosophicallypoor. Bachelard’s writings on physics, Cavaillès’s work on mathematics,Foucault’s and Canguilhem’s research on the life and human sciences offerdetailed analyses of the emergence of new conceptual frameworks in thesciences—work whose interest is largely independent of its theoretical un-derpinnings. However, their theoretical assumptions are at best vaguelyarticulated, and their alternative “philosophy of the concept” is de�nedlargely by negation: it is not a transcendentalist philosophy of science, inthat it does not assign a central epistemological role to the conscious actsof subjects. Cavaillès is hostile to any project that seeks the sources of logicand evidence, method and data, in the minds of scientists. Similarly, whenFoucault in the 1960s describes his work as concerned with the uncon-scious of science, he means to underscore what it is not, namely aphenomenological investigation of the history of the sciences. He is quiteright to emphasize the distinction between his work and that of Husserl.But his need to do so stems from the overwhelming similarities betweenhis theory of archaeology and Husserl’s. Indeed, both of our key conceptsfrom the Archaeology of Knowledge (“archaeology” and “historical a priori”),are of Husserlian origin.6 And both are repeatedly explained there interms of what they are not: the discourses that comprise �elds of knowl-edge, and the rules and ontologies attached to them are, for instance, notconditions on the experience of historical actors. Of course, they do havethe function of unifying �elds of objects by means of rules, and in thissense their role is parallel to Kant’s requirement that the understandingunify the date of conscious experience. But here again, Foucault deniesthat his theory is a Kantian one, claiming instead that his rules of dis-course differ from Kantian rules of thought in being rules governing lan-guage. They are not “condition[s] of validity for judgments, but . . . con-


6. “Husserl always regretted that an expression that truly captured the aim of philoso-phy was already in the possession of a positive science, namely the expression: archaeol-ogy”(Fink 1939, p. 246).

dition[s] of reality for statements” (Foucault 1969, p. 167). The historicala prioris constituted by these rules are not conditions on what could bethought, but of what could be said in a given science in a given age.

This insistence on the theoretical priority of language to thought is in-deed characteristic of the French backlash against phenomenology in theperiod after the war, in which Foucault was only one of many participants.As I shall suggest below, the seeds for this reaction were planted byHusserl himself in his late recognition of what Merleau-Ponty called the“problem of language,” that is to say the problem of explaining how signsconvey meaning in the absence of concomitant intentional acts. The divi-sion between Foucault and his structuralist allies on the one hand,7 andphenomenologists such as Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre on the other,consists above all in the former’s insistence that meaning should be ana-lyzed by looking to the implicit structures of sign-systems in preference toconsidering it as a cognitive phenomenon. This French “linguistic turn” isanalogous to simultaneous developments in the English-speaking world,and it is characterized by a similar skepticism regarding the theoreticalvalue of meanings or intentions, at least in so far as these are conceived aselements of consciousness.

As we just saw, in Cavaillès’s critique it is not the “problem of lan-guage” which plays the central role, but rather the transcendental ap-proach to the philosophy of science and logic. Nevertheless, the two topicsare intimately connected, in that the problem of accounting for languageand meaning within the framework of a transcendental philosophy is cen-tral to the late work of Husserl that Cavaillès criticizes.8 And it is also, onhis view, a central topic of early logicism.9 The dif�culty, in a nutshell, isthat transcendental theories assume that the meanings of physical signsare mental events (senses, judgments, possible experiences). But it is


7. Who is to be called a structuralist and who not is of course a heated question at thistime. Let me just use the term loosely to refer to Foucault, Lacan, Lévi-Strauss, Jakobsonand others at the time who drew on Saussure’s work in linguistics.

8. The gap between a subject’s immediate grasp of language and the unknown historyof that language that Merleau-Ponty takes as the departure for his discussion in his (1960)is �rst raised by Hendrik Pos in an article appearing in the Revue de Métaphysique et de Mo-rale (1939). This issue is dedicated to Husserl, and it contains the �rst printing of Husserl’s“Origin of Geometry”, as well as (Fink 1939), the article Cavaillès refers to when he de-scribes phenomenology as a kind of archaeology. The concluding paragraphs of Pos’s arti-cle, in which he stresses the fundamental role of self-consciousness(that is to say of imme-diate subjective knowledge) for the possibility of the human sciences (his example islinguistics), are an interesting foil to Foucault’s later insistence that the human sciences de-pend on the historically contingent notion of “Man.”

9. See my discussion of Frege and Wittgenstein above, as well the passages on logicismin (Cavaillès 1981, pp. 165–166).

equally clear that language has a capacity to generate, or at least convey,meanings that are not the products of our own conscious activity. Let meemphasize that this subordination of language to thought is not an acci-dental feature of transcendental philosophy. It is, on the contrary, essentialto its aim of explaining the binding character of normative principles. Thereason that propositional logic is valid for linguistic statements, for exam-ple, is that it derives from constraints on propositional thought. Transcen-dental theories argue that in placing conditions on the structure ofthoughts, these constraints also determine general connections amongkinds of thoughts, for instance those holding among their categoricalforms. These formal relations are codi�ed in normative sciences such aslogic, which tells us what sorts of transitions between sentences necessar-ily preserve truth.

This form of transcendental argument is therefore committed to theprinciple that meaning is determined by thought, and that language—thesystem of signs that refer to, or bear meanings—must conform to this de-terminacy requirement. Such a requirement is clearly exempli�ed byFrege’s demand that every well-formed sentence of a logical calculus musthave a sense: if this were not the case, then logical (syntactical) operationson other sentences could generate meaningless expressions, so that logicwould not be truth-preserving. In other words, although logic is appliedto sentences, it derives its normative force from meanings or thoughts. Theproblem, once again, is that it seems to be a simple fact about actual expe-rience, and actual scienti�c practice, that we operate with meaning-bearing signs without any clear idea of their senses. We inherit both thevocabulary and grammar of the languages we speak, including those offormal scienti�c languages. And this fact puts pressure on the transcen-dental theorist: since a speaker of these languages may never consciouslyhave �xed their meanings, the theorist must explain where the meaningsof such expressions are to be found, and such explanations run the risk ofextravagance. Frege, once again, is obliged to postulate an entirely sepa-rate “realm” of senses, which are neither signs nor their referents. Husserlseeks refuge from this problem by arguing that the meanings of such signsare “sedimented.” At some time in the past, there were indeed consciousintentional acts that assigned meanings to these signs. If we want to knowwhat the implicit rules of use governing these signs actually are, we haveto inquire into their phenomenological roots. He concludes that it is anessential task of the epistemology of the sciences to identify and reactivatethese sedimented meanings and rules.

The anti-phenomenological response to this “problem of language” issimply to drop the idea that meaning consists in hidden intentional acts,and to accept the fact that sign-systems acquire their meaning from else-


where. One thereby shifts the investigation away from the cognitive actsof thinking subjects, in favor of, for instance, social structures orspeech-acts. But it is evident that this solution carries a number of prob-lems with it: defenders of an intentionalist approach will rightly objectthat, whatever the legitimacy of social or behaviorist theories of meaning,they will never get at the very phenomenon which was to be analyzed.This objection is in fact programmatic, for both Frege’s and Husserl’s ap-proaches were conceived as foils to naturalism: Frege’s senses and Husserl’sintentions cannot be construed as social or psychological without render-ing the logical relations they determine purely contingent. In such a case,they would fail to be Denknotwendigkeiten, “necessities of thought,” asFrege insists they must be. On my view, the negative de�nition of the phi-losophy of the concept that Cavaillès and Foucault adopt avoids the “prob-lem of language” that emerged within phenomenology by denying thecentrality of consciousness to meaning, but it does not adequately addressthe problems that remain once one has done so. The philosophers of theconcept want the normative component of transcendentalist theorieswithout its mentalist commitments. This desire leads them to posit un-conscious structural conditions on language, and these unconscious condi-tions are no less problematic than the hidden intentional acts they wereintended to replace.

In the following, I will develop Cavaillès’s criticisms of the transcen-dental philosophy of science by considering in sequence his critique ofHusserl’s late work, The Crisis of the European Sciences, and then the criti-cisms of Kant with which he opens his On Logic and the Theory of Science. Inconclusion, I will expand on the philosophy of the concept subscribed toby Bachelard, Canguilhem, Cavaillès and Foucault, and will considerabove all the philosophical dif�culties raised by their theory. My discus-sion will take the form of a close reading of two passages from the lastpage of Cavaillès’s book, the �rst cited by Foucault in his essay onCanguilhem (Foucault 1994b), the second cited by Canguilhem in an es-say on Foucault (Canguilhem 1967):

Still, the justi�catory evidence of transcendental analysis is neces-sarily unique: while there is consciousness of progress, there is noprogress of consciousness. Whereas one of the essential problems ofthe theory of science is just that progress is not augmentation byjuxtaposition, in which the earlier subsists with the new, but a per-petual revision of contents by extension and erasure.10


10. Cavaillès 1960, p. 78: Au moins l’évidence justi�catrice de l’analyse trans-cendantale est-elle nécessairement unique: s’il y a conscience des progrès, il n’y a pasprogrès de la conscience. Or l’un des problèmes essentiels de la doctrine de la science est

There is no one consciousness generating its products, nor simplyimmanent to them, rather it is each time in the immediacy of theidea. . . . Progress is either material, or between singular essences,and its motor is the need to exceed each of these. It is not a philoso-phy of consciousness but a philosophy of the concept that can pro-vide a theory of science. The generative necessity is not one of anactivity, but of a dialectic. 11

Cavaillès’s main objection here is quite simply that transcendental phi-losophy, taken in the widest extension of the term, can never explain howscience can change. And the reason it cannot do so is that it is committedto the idea of an eternal and unchanging form of reason. Because the latteris, so to speak, already with us (in our minds, in our past, or in our lan-guage), the philosopher’s task is inevitably directed towards the past. BothCanguilhem and Foucault endorse this analysis, because they are inter-ested in analyzing the development of scienti�c rationality. In order to seewhat is at stake philosophically, I will unpack each of these quotations inturn.

The �rst passage I have cited is a reductio. Transcendental analysis seeksthe normative roots of logic and mathematics in original (and in this senseconstitutive) intentional acts. But this means that such analyses cannotmake sense of a basic property of science, which is that it surpasses andobliterates its past. Therefore, such analyses are falsely premised: it is nottrue that there is only one, ultimate domain of justi�cation and evidence,namely human consciousness. As we have seen, this concern with the nor-mative origin of scienti�c logic drives Husserl’s phenomenological project.However, it only becomes an explicitly historical concern in his late work.

Husserl argues in the Crisis that we need an historical analysis ofscienti�c concepts because these concepts are, in his terminology, “sedi-mented,” by which he means that they are concepts whose original mean-ings are concealed from us. As science progresses, it lays down layers offormalized systems, whose elements are increasingly remote from their ex-periential base. His primary example is that of geometry. Geometry wasoriginally a technique of measurement immediately related to the life-world experiences and needs of the �rst “proto-geometers.” In an initial,


que justement le progrès ne soit pas augmentation par juxtaposition, l’antérieur subsistantavec le nouveau, mais révision perpétuelle des contenus par approfondissementet rature.

11. Cavaillès 1960, p. 78: Il n’y a pas une conscience génératrice de ses produits, ousimplement immanente à eux, mais elle est chaque fois dans l’immédiat de l’idée . . . . Leprogrès est matériel ou entre essences singulières, son moteur l’exigence de dépassement dechacune d’elles. Ce n’est pas une philosophie de la conscience mais une philosophiedu con-cept qui peut donner une doctrine de la science. La nécessité génératrice n’est pas celled’une activité, mais d’une dialectique.

critical step, this knowledge was cast in axiomatic form. The formaliza-tion of geometry made it possible to reason concerning mathematical ob-jects, and to produce inter-subjectively valid, eternal truths concerningthese ideal entities. But this procedure severed the link between mathe-matical concepts and their life-world correlates. One could now thinkabout geometry mechanically, by manipulating signs, so that one could dogeometry without thinking about its phenomenal origins.

The next sedimentary layer Husserl considers in the Crisis is that ofGalilean physics, which draws on axiomatized geometry without regard toits origins, ultimately positing it as the structure of physical space. It laysdown a new layer of formalized science, namely the system of Newtonianmechanics, which also involves concepts with life-world correlates, such asthat of force. These are also �xed symbolically, they sediment, and they arethen rei�ed as the world of mechanistic physics. Because this world is pos-ited as the causal undercarriage of reality, it gives rise to a “crisis” in thesciences, for it now seems as though the phenomenal life-world, which isthe true epistemological foundation of knowledge, is nothing but asupervenient illusion. The crisis can only be resolved, on Husserl’s view,by reversing the process of sedimentation in order to reveal the genuinegrounds of the sciences. It is this part of the phenomenological methodthat Fink characterizes as archaeology, which remark Cavaillès cites as anapt description of Husserl’s project.

Thus Husserl thinks we need an historical epistemology of the sciencesbecause the life-world is buried under a sediment of scienti�c concepts. Byinquiring into the origins of these conceptual layers, we “reactivate” theiroriginal meanings, and thereby reveal both the source of scienti�c normsand the original source of meaning. Calling such an inquiry a true episte-mology of the sciences, he anticipates the obvious objection. Why onearth do I need to ask about the conditions under which concepts were�rst developed in order to give account of their legitimate application?Surely I have the statements of geometry in front of me, so that I can workback to their axioms and then inquire into their validity? Isn’t that what itmeans to conduct an epistemological inquiry? Husserl responds to hisown interjections by arguing that all concepts, indeed all cultural prod-ucts, have an implicit historical dimension. We know that they were pro-duced in the past, and we could not possibly make sense of questions con-cerning their legitimacy without having this fact in mind. For instance, toask whether a cultural product such as a hammer is a good hammer isto know that it is a hammer, and that it was produced by people to carryout certain tasks. These prior purposes are implicitly invoked whenever Iconsider the hammer as a tool, instead of as a lump of steel and wood.Similarly, I do not come to learn concepts, indeed I could not learn them,


without �rst accepting them as cultural products with an intentional his-tory, even if I do not know exactly what this history was. In order to applythem in new situations, I must at least imagine some past application.

What distinguishes this account of Husserl’s from his earlier work is itsinsistence on the historical dimension, which is a late consequence of hisdesire to overcome Kant’s formalism. Typically enough, Husserl’s theoryof scienti�c norms assigns a central role to intentions and their objects. Inorder to understand what our logic should look like, we inquire into in-tentional acts, which inquiry of course addresses their referents. Indeed, anessential aim of phenomenological analyses is to elucidate the simultaneousconstitution of intentions and their objects. In doing so, we will cometo understand what structures of consciousness are essential to our havingintentions of a particular kind, for instance mathematical ones. We aresupposed to get a transcendental logic, but one that is founded on realexperience, as opposed to intuitions and categories borrowed from the es-tablished sciences and posited as hidden cognitive faculties. Such an inves-tigation therefore eschews aprioristic demonstrations in favor of phen-omenological investigations of �elds of concrete experience. In his earlierworks, Husserl still imagines these constitutive intentional acts as occur-ring within the con�nes of a single consciousness. Just as in the relatedconstitution-systems of Carnap, we are to imagine a single consciousnessstarting from a phenomenal base of givens in order to work its way up tothe high-level concepts of scienti�c theory. But by the time of the Crisis,Husserl sees this approach as overly simplistic. It is evident that the �eldsof ideal objects that make up public and scienti�c ontologies are not givenin immediate experience—indeed they cannot be, because in order to havethe degree of intersubjective validity and temporal invariance that we re-quire from the sciences, their theoretical objects have to be distinct fromthe immediate experiences of given individuals. They are, Husserl empha-sizes, �rst constituted as intentional objects when the appropriate writtenformalisms are introduced. But these formalisms are the products of a longcultural tradition. The reason that we need an historical investigation intothe “Origin of Geometry” or into the origins of Galilean physics, is thatthe formalisms that anchor the possibility of referring to ideal scienti�cobjects are something that each individual consciousness has inherited. Inorder to know the logic that is appropriate to scienti�c objects, we have atleast to imagine a situation in which they were constituted and sedi-mented, or in Husserlian terminology, the situation in which their idealform was concretely available to a consciousness. Husserl recognized, inother words, that intersubjective language could not be accounted for withhis usual phenomenological methods, for the simple reason that the mean-ings of words are not something that the individual consciousness creates.


Because such a historical investigation must be undertaken from thepoint of view of the present, and because it is concerned with layers ofsedimented meanings that “constituted” the objects of past societies andcultures, it cannot be carried out without postulating what Husserl callsan historical a priori (Husserl 1939, pp. 221–222). Such an historical apriori might, for example, consist in the social structures and the measure-ment practices that formed the epistemological context in which axiom-atic geometry emerged. This a priori is prior in a double, if not an equivo-cal sense: it is a prior condition on the cognitive actions of the proto-geometers; however, it is also an a priori condition on our conceiving ofthe emergence of their proto-science. This term makes clear that Husserl’shistory of the sciences cannot to be understood as an empirical one. Inwriting a transcendental history of scienti�c concepts, we are aiming todiscern paradigmatic formative events. Like the rational reconstructions ofLakatos, who was also inspired in this regard by Hegel, Husserl’s recon-struction of the history of geometry doesn’t try to get the facts straight.On the contrary, he would claim that there cannot really be any questionof getting the historical facts straight until an analysis of his sort has beenperformed: if we are trying to imagine what went on in Greek society atthe time geometry was created, we must obviously ascribe to the Greekssome sort of framework of meaning that we too can understand. Therecannot be a question of reconstructing past intentions without assuming aconceptual framework common both to our forebears and to us. History, aswe look at it, can be comprehensible only if we assume the existence ofsuch schemes. At the same time, we regard our present scheme as the re-sult of an historical process. These strata of meanings and traditions whichculminate in our own form what Husserl calls the “internal structure” ofhistory. A phenomenological investigation of the history of scienti�c con-cepts thus involves a curious fusion of empirical and a priori methods. Itdraws on historical data and a priori insights concerning human cognitionin order to reconstruct the succession of conceptual schemes that producedthe present one.12


12. Some readers may feel that this scheme of Husserl’s is top-heavy. It should be saidin his defence, however, that any rational reconstruction implicitly involves the notion ofan internal history of concepts that is both distinct of empirical history all while it revealsthe true meaning of the latter. That Husserl and Lakatos are obviously inspired by Hegelin this regard may give analytic philosophers reason to reject the both of them. But ana-lytic philosophers are just as committed to the notion of “rational history” as was Hegel,and indeed Russell’s in�uential history of Western philosophy was also directly in�uenced(some might use a stronger term) by Hegel’s. Conversely, one cannot very well hope toeliminate such rational historical elements from a history of knowledge, in order to do“non-presentist”history of science. As always, Husserl is trying to identify the presupposi-

So in Husserl’s transcendental analysis there is not only a search for thehistorical bases of current scienti�c concepts; there is also a search for theirabsolute normative ground. This ground is to be found in the primitiveintentional acts of our imagined forebears. Thus Cavaillès’s objection thataccording to Husserl’s theory of science, “if we are conscious of progress,still there is no progress of consciousness.” We could not imagine theepistemological context of the emergence of geometry if we could notimagine what Husserl calls the “life-world” of other human beings. Thislife-world includes what some analytic philosophers today would call theworld of phenomenal content, the everyday world of colors, shapes, as wellas the world of naive physics and psychology, for instance other peoplewith their wishes and wants. Both our supposed Greek ancestors and wemust inhabit such a world whatever the current state of scienti�c develop-ment, for only on this assumption is the conceptual scheme of other hu-man beings living in other cultures in any sense imaginable. It is, onemight say, the base level historical a priori that will be brought to light bythe archaeology of scienti�c concepts. But in uncovering conceptual strataand tracing the norms of science back to their phenomenal origins, we areengaged in a conscious regress. And to Cavaillès, this whole analysis isfalsi�ed by the true nature of scienti�c progress. Science does not consistof nested axiomatic systems, indeed this is not even true of the history ofmathematics, as Cavaillès argues in his work on logic and set theory. Ear-lier systems of science are not preserved as science develops, rather sciencedevelops by revising and erasing these systems, which may indeed be com-pletely obliterated in the process. Epistemologically speaking, the con-scious acts of our predecessors are irrelevant to us once we have rewrittentheir earlier system. It follows that the idea of a trans-temporal phenome-nal ground of scienti�c knowledge is otiose, and with it the idea of a tran-scendental consciousness (or, more modestly, an internal structure of thehistory of reason) spanning the common human life-world.

Before turning to the second of the two quotations under consideration,let me summarize what we have learned so far. Transcendentalist philoso-phies of science seek to ground norms in the origins of conscious experi-ence. They explain their validity by arguing that the latter are implicit inthe structure of experience, whether this experience is my own, or that ofmy predecessors. However, this philosophy is backward-looking, and itcannot really account for the historical facts: norms change, and ontologiesare rejected and eventually forgotten. In the second passage cited above,Cavaillès suggests his alternative to this regressive philosophy. Instead of


tions that are involved in a rational investigation of this sort, that is to say our implicitstance towards past reason.

deriving it from the philosophy of consciousness, Cavaillès argues, weshould conceive the doctrine of the sciences as being one of “concepts anddialectic.” This remark invokes a speci�cally philosophical objection cen-tering on Kant’s transcendental deduction, and which Cavaillès developsin the opening pages of his book. This critique is, once again, extended toinclude Husserl’s philosophy, but it is also intended to apply to the philos-ophy of science of the Vienna Circle.13 I will concentrate in the followingpages on Kant and Husserl because it is the distinction between “concep-tual” and phenomenological theories of historical epistemology that isimportant to understanding Foucault’s and Canguilhem’s application ofCavaillès’s ideas. I will then conclude with a few critical remarks concern-ing this application.

Cavaillès’s main objection to Kant’s transcendental arguments concernsthe latter’s attempt to justify the necessity of logic by invoking the unify-ing function of the categories for experience. This is why he insists on thefragmentation of consciousness, that consciousness is “lost in the immedi-acy of the act” or that “the term consciousness does not have a univocal ap-plication.” For, on Cavaillès’s view, Kant cannot reconcile the generality oflogic (Cavaillès sometimes speaks of its “absoluteness”) with its transcen-dental origins. That is to say, Kant proves the validity of logic by invokingthe constitutive role of the categories in experience; however, this form ofdeduction precludes the resultant logic’s having general application. Tosee why this is so, one needs to recall why Kant’s project requires a tran-scendental deduction of the categories, which are of course the basis ofgeneral (Aristotelian) logic.

If he is to justify the validity of this logic for all possible experiences,Kant cannot merely appeal to the fact that we do think by means of thecategories. Even if we assume that they result from pure logical functionsof the understanding, this does not explain why they are objectively valid,in other words why the understanding is always right to follow them.Kant’s solution is that these functions of the understanding are conditionsfor the unity of apperception. There would be no consciousness if thesefunctions were not actively constituting our uni�ed experience by con-necting the data of intuition. In the language of the �rst Critique, to saythat consciousness obtains is to say that there is a uni�cation of a manifoldin a series of cognitive acts. Kant’s strategy is therefore to isolate the cog-nitive acts responsible for the uni�cation of experience, and then to extractlogic by means of a dual process of abstraction.

Cavaillès, in his opening discussion of the role and the source of rules inscience, characterizes Kant’s deduction of these rules as follows: First, the


13. I touch on Cavaillès’s objections to Wittgenstein’s philosophyof logic in my (2003).

empirical is reduced to the pure content of a mathematical form whollydetermined by intuition. Second, the content of thought in general issloughed off, leaving us with the pure functions of the understanding.Cavaillès objects to both of these steps that either (1) we must be able tomake sense of a content independent of its form in order to imagine its be-ing eliminated. But then the form is not a condition on our conceiving thecontent. Or (2) form and content are indeed indissolubly wed, but thenthe necessity inheres in this single composite, and we are not isolating thenecessary condition by eliminating the part we call the matter or content.Thus Kant is wrong to think that he has deduced the validity, and thusthe normative character of general logic by means of his appeal to con-sciousness. The logic that governs judgments, if it can be shown to bevalid, must involve an ontology, as does the logic of Aristotle’s Analytics.And if it does not, then it is entirely empty. “In a philosophy of conscious-ness,” Cavaillès concludes, “either logic is transcendental, or it does notexist.”14

This refutation of Kant’s argument, although highly compressed, doesindeed strike at a notoriously weak link in the argument of the Critique.Cavaillès’s point, in a nutshell, is that if Kant is consistent in maintainingthat every cognition [Erkenntnis] contains a unifying concept and a uni�edintuition, then he cannot speak of a prior, non-uni�ed multiplicity whichis subsequently uni�ed by the pure functions of the understanding. Con-versely, and as Kant himself acknowledged, these pure functions and theirassociated categories are empty without the contents they unify. Kant’sclaim is that the categories, once they have been shown to be implicated atthe origin of each cognition, have in consequence also been shown to bevalid for all possible subsequent cognitions. This would indeed parallel Aris-totle’s (or at the very least the scholastic) justi�cation of the logical role ofthe categories by means of their metaphysical one, in other words that be-cause they are fundamental modes of being they are also fundamentalmodes of propositions. But of course Kant doesn’t want to do that: his cat-egories are not modes of being, but modes of cognition. What they governare all and only those experiences that can be “anticipated,” to use Kant’slanguage, namely the extensive and intensive magnitudes of which themultiplicity of phenomenal experience is composed.15


14. “Dans une philosophie de la conscience ou la logique est transcendantale, ou ellen’est pas.” Note that we have “elle n’est pas” and not “elle ne l’est pas”.

15. Some readers may object that Kant has no intention of justifying the principles oflogic, but that for him the latter are beyond justi�cation precisely because they are tran-scendental. It is true that he does not aim to justify his (i.e. our human) logic in the senseof showing it preferable to some alternative. But the critical philosophy does justify thesciences of logic and mathematics in another sense: it guarantees their future validity for

The problem, Cavaillès argues, is that this transcendental justi�cationof logic has been falsi�ed by our repeated encounters with scienti�c ob-jects that have contravened our logical principles. This �aw in Kant’s sys-tem has been most recently revealed, in Cavaillès’s opinion, in Hilbert’sand Gödel’s work on the foundations of mathematics. Hilbert’s project ofaxiomatizing the various branches of mathematics was intended to pro-vide these with logically secure foundations, even though Hilbert did notseek to reduce mathematics to logic. He took the axioms to express syn-thetic, as opposed to analytic truths, and thus far he sided with Kant (andPoincaré) against the logicists (Cavaillès 1981, pp. 90–93).16 But Hilbert,because he wished to establish the completeness and consistency of his sys-tems, thereby put in play the logical rules involved. A system is completewhen all truths are deducible. Only in this case are the synthetic truths ofmathematics strictly regimented by logical principles. Only then does thebusiness of axiomatizing isolate the synthetic content of the science inquestion. From this point of view, Gödel’s result touches the heart ofKant’s system, for it shows that there is no “general logic” adequate tomathematical knowledge, that is to the sciences of pure intuition. Howmuch less should we expect there to be one for those concerning empiricalintuitions? For Cavaillès, this result is the gravest symptom of a generalailment, namely that the Kantian philosophy of science “completely ig-nore[s] the contribution of the object to the structure of theory” (Cavaillès1960, p. 14). It does so because it demands that the essential structure oftheory be determined by rational principles. These rational principles arein turn principles of the unity of consciousness, and thus the unity of sci-ence is nothing else than a projection of this unity onto the natural world.“There is no science in the sense of an autonomous reality that can be char-acterised as such, but rather rational uni�cation following a �xed type of adiversity organised by the understanding . . . ” (Cavaillès 1960, p. 14).There is no room for discovery and temporal contingency in this picture ofscience, just as there is no room provided in the transcendental deductionfor data beyond those that can be constructed or anticipated in pure formsof intuition. Both in the speci�c mathematical cases that Cavaillès dealtwith in his earlier technical work, and in the general case of transcenden-talist theories of science, the foundational character of logic can be pre-served only by cutting its connection to the real complexity of scienti�cobjects. Conversely, if logic is to retain its normative role in the sciences,we must concede that the latter cannot be justi�ed transcendentally.


our reasoning concerning the empirical world. One can of course restrict the a priori to itsconstitutive role, thereby “relativising” it in Reichenbach’s sense. But the resulting philos-ophy, while Kantian, is no longer the philosophy of Kant.

16. See also the detailed commentary of Sinaceur (1994, pp. 55–66).

Husserl, as we have seen, is taken to task on similar grounds: his searchfor normative origins is regressive, and it cannot make sense of an inter-vention in the world of science from outside of consciousness (indeed, themethodology of the epoché deliberately shuts out this possibility). Never-theless, Cavaillès concedes that Husserl’s work is superior to that of bothKant and his logicist descendants to the degree that it seeks the sources oflogical and mathematical norms in concrete intentional acts. Indeed,Husserl, in the sections of the Crisis that were supposed to form its mainbody, and which were published only in the 1960s, characterizes his aimsin a manner completely consistent with Cavaillès’s take on the book, inother words with reference to the transcendental deduction. In these pas-sages of Part III of the Crisis, Husserl argues that his life-world was im-plicitly assumed by Kant in the transcendental deduction, but that Kantfailed to pursue the matter properly. Kant was right, claims Husserl, tobegin the “descending” analysis of the A-deduction in the world of every-day uni�ed experience, but he passed too quickly over this “realm . . . ofunexamined evidences of being” that are “permanent presuppositions ofscienti�c and philosophical thought” (Husserl 1962, p. 112). Kant ac-knowledged the existence of the life-world, but failed to see that the de-duction should be carried out on this level. In consequence, the logic andmathematics he extracted was one he had implanted arti�cially, that is tosay Aristotelian logic plus the building-blocks of Newtonian physics.Whereas, Husserl believes, the phenomenological method will yield theproper logic precisely because it is grounded in actual, as opposed to ideal-ized, phenomenal experience.

You can imagine how Cavaillès responds to this: Husserl’s methoddoesn’t really get around the problems with Kant’s. This “pseudo-tempo-ral” origin of concepts is not only a chimera, but even if it weren’t, itwouldn’t avoid the dilemma that Kant faced already: even if the originalconstitutive acts of consciousness force a given transcendental logic on us,why should, indeed how could, that logic be shown to be binding on ex-perience at a later stage of science? Expanding on his critique of Kant,Cavaillès comments on Husserl that “If transcendental logic really doesfound logic, then there is no absolute logic. . . . If there is an absolutelogic, it can only derive its authority from itself, and it is not transcenden-tal” (Cavaillès 1960, p. 66). Applied to the notion of an historical episte-mology, this critique yields the result that such an enterprise is “an abdi-cation of thought” because it looks backwards to the necessitiessupposedly implied in foundational acts, instead of considering theopen-ended future in which new objects and systems of concepts are de-veloped. The reason we need a logic of the concept, or a dialectic, accord-ing to Cavaillès, is that logic is in fact always concerned with a range of


possible experience about which we know as yet nothing. Moreover, thelogic we have in hand may always reveal itself as inadequate to a domainwe know well. This may appear to undermine the normative status oflogic. But in fact it does so only if we are in the grip of the philosophy ofconsciousness. That is to say, only if we think that the validity of logicmust be determined once and for all by the structure of cognition.

Despite the force of Cavaillès’s critique, it is dif�cult to discern the out-lines of the “philosophy of the concept” that he, along with Bachelard andCanguilhem, intends to offer as an alternative. Within the philosophy ofmathematics, Cavaillès favors Tarski’s semantic approach over those ofCarnap and Frege, arguing that Tarski did not fall prey to the formalist’sdesire to develop mathematics out of a single stock of privileged syntacticrules, trying instead to discern the logic implicit in extant theories whichare “rooted” in actual mathematical objects and practices.17 In general,Cavaillès and his associates favor a philosophy of science that accords equalweight to the contributions of the objects of theory (which are conceivedas independent of both the theories and the theoreticians concerned withthem), to those of the theories themselves, and to those of the “criticalrecti�cations” of working scientists. Their approach shares, in otherwords, many of the virtues and vices of recent analytic work in philosophyof science. On the positive side, the philosophers of the concept are plural-ists and, to some extent, realists; they seek a theory of science that is trueto the actual practice of science; and they retain an interest in normativequestions. However, the theory that results is something of a grab-bag,and it is better de�ned with reference to the formalist and transcendental-ist theories that it rejects than it is through any individual philosophicalor epistemological theses.

This is certainly true of Foucault’s use of the term “philosophy of theconcept,” as I argued at the opening of this paper. He uses this term in or-der to distinguish his own archaeological investigations from their mostobvious forebear, namely the phenomenological archaeology called for byHusserl. Foucault’s archaeology, as I will argue in conclusion, aims at un-covering the “historical a prioris” forming the deep structure of the sci-ences of various historical periods; however, these structures are more het-erogeneous than those imagined by Husserl. But just like Cavaillès,Foucault does not want to throw the baby out with the bath water: he doesnot want his historical analyses to collapse into mere social history. Thisnormative aspect of the French theorists I discuss in this paper clearly dis-tinguishes their work from recent English-language history and sociology


17. Cf. (Cavaillès 1936), quoted and discussed in (Sinaceur 1994, pp. 108–110).

of science, and it thereby reveals an essential dif�culty inherent to anyproperly philosophical study of the history of the sciences.

Foucault’s archaeological project up until his Archaeology of Knowledgecan be characterized as a subversion of Husserl in the light of Cavaillès’scritique. By this I mean that the overall structure of Husserl’s scheme ispreserved, while the key epistemological tenet is rejected. In an interviewfrom this period, Foucault characterized his project negatively, as “tryingto discover in the history of science something like the unconscious.” Theworking hypothesis, he continues, “is that the history of science, the his-tory of knowledge, does not simply obey the general law of the progressof reason, it is not human consciousness, it is not human reason that isin some sense the owner of the laws of its history” (Foucault 1994a,pp. 665–666). What does this scienti�c unconsciousness consist in? Well,among other things, it is a subliminal matrix that determines theidenti�cation and ordering of scienti�c objects, as is explained in The Orderof Things. More generally, it corresponds to what Foucault calls in The Ar-chaeology of Knowledge an “historical a priori.” Husserl’s historical a prioriwas, as we saw, the internal structure of meaning that (1) conditioned the�eld of objects and methods that historical scientists, such as the proto-geometers, were concerned with; and that (2) enables us to understandtheir intentions and traditions. Foucault’s historical a priori differs fromHusserl’s in that it does not describe the framework of past intentionalacts. It is instead supposed to be the framework that made possible theformation of past “énoncés” or statements, which are to be identi�ed andanalyzed without any reference to the conscious intentions of individualspeakers.

Thus Foucault’s a priori resembles that of Kant and Husserl in being anontological ordering that is, for this very reason, a source of normativeprinciples. That is why he calls it the source of the “rationality” of histori-cal periods. But it is so only in his quali�ed sense, for it is not “human rea-son” but some other ordering principle that is at work in the sciences ofhistorical ages. And it is not human thought, but human speech that isnormed. The most obvious examples of such historical a prioris inFoucault’s work are the three épistémès that organize the scienti�c dis-courses of the Renaissance, the Classical, and the Modern ages in The Orderof Things. These structures cut across disciplines, they are in large measureinvisible to intentional historical actors, and yet they fundamentally de-termine the things that scientists in these periods do and say, the thingsthey take to be signi�cant, unworthy of notice, or indeed self-evident. Inthis regard, they resemble Wittgenstein’s “grammatical” rules, or Kuhn’srelated disciplinary matrices. In all three cases, one supposes that there is


an historically contingent a priori at work, whose impact is not consciousto scientists or speakers all while it fundamentally determines their selec-tions of problems and methods, as well as the sorts of ontologies they arewilling to countenance. Archaeology, like phenomenology, seeks to under-stand the meaning of past science by revealing these historical a prioris.

Let me then conclude by elaborating on this critical distinction be-tween Husserl’s and Foucault’s conceptions of the historical epistemologyof the sciences. I will do so by citing a criticism that Canguilhem made ofKuhn in the introduction to his Ideology and Rationality and which he tookto show the superiority of the French “philosophy of the concept.”Canguilhem concedes that Kuhn’s notions of paradigms and of normal sci-ence are useful to the extent that they highlight the historical develop-ment of scienti�c reason. But, Canguilhem objects, they are too Kantian:by invoking the ideas of intentions and of regulating acts, Kuhn’s theoryallows these two to become unstuck. More seriously, since Kuhn “accordsthem an empirical mode of existence, as facts of culture” what seemed tobe a critical philosophy turns out to be social psychology (Canguilhem1977, p. 23). Canguilhem then goes on to contrast Kuhn to Bachelard andCavaillès, for whom the rationality of mathematical physics inheres in thenormative practices of mathematicians. The development of scienti�cnorms must, on the view of Bachelard, Canguilhem and Cavaillès, besought within the actual practice of science, for “a science is a discoursethat is normed by its critical recti�cation” (Canguilhem 1977, p. 21).Canguilhem objects, in other words, to the same tactic that Cavaillès criti-cized in Kant, in which one considers norms (the pure functions of the un-derstanding) in distinction from the thoughts or intuitions they necessar-ily govern. In so doing, one prepares the ground for the claim that,although empirical intuitions are not products of the understanding, theyare nonetheless bound by its laws. But in Kant the necessity in question isa properly transcendental one. In Kuhn’s work, Canguilhem objects, “Theparadigm is a user’s choice. The normal is what is shared . . . by a collec-tive of specialists in an institution . . . ” (Canguilhem 1977, p. 23). Thenorms in question are conceived naturalistically, and this means that thereis no distinction to be made, from the point of view of the historical epis-temologist himself, between rational and irrational science, except per-haps a pragmatic one.

On Canguilhem’s hostile reading, Kuhn follows one of the two deadends that present themselves once norms and contents come unstuck: hisnormal science is a social fact. The other path is the one followed byHusserl: make the norms a product of a self-validating consciousness thatinteracts with scienti�c objects only after they have been processed by thatvery consciousness. This leads to a static and internalist view of scienti�c


development: The autonomous contribution of objects and experimentscollapses, while the norms become irrevocably �xed. Husserl’s historical apriori, because it is ultimately a product of consciousness, will not permitreal critical re�ection, for such re�ection is de�ned as a regression to life-world origins. And it rules out the possibility that changes in norms beprovoked by unexpected inputs on the side of the objects themselves. Thisis why Foucault, while following Husserl in identifying aprioristic ele-ments in past science, nonetheless feels compelled to situate them on aplane that will prevent such a collapse. It is on this plane, he claims, “thata culture, stripping itself of the empirical orders prescribed to it by its pri-mary codes, stops being guided by them passively . . . and liberates itselfenough to determine that they are perhaps not the only ones possible, noreven the best ones” (Foucault 1966, p. 12). This plane of ordering is nei-ther that of Kuhn’s social conventions, nor is it that of a Husserlian histor-ical a priori, which is a structure of consciousness.

Of course, one cannot help but suspect that Foucault’s solution toCanguilhem’s and Cavaillès’s dilemma comes at a high price, for we wouldcertainly like to know where this plane of unconscious orders should betaken to lie, in other words what the substrate of the scienti�c unconsciousis supposed to be. Furthermore, if this a priori is neither a structure ofconsciousness, nor a sociobiological entity, how does it become actual?That is to say, in what sense does it cause or constrain the things that sci-entists say? If this a priori acts causally, then it provides an explanation ofcertain regularities that we observe in past scienti�c cultures. But then itwould be what Canguilhem dismissed as mere social psychology. On theother hand, the demand that it be unconscious means that the historicalactors are themselves unaware of it. If it is a system of rules governingtheir speech and conduct, then these rules are not something that they de-liberately instituted and willfully follow. They are at best, like the basicrules governing Wittgensteinian forms of life, rules they follow blindly.And the most an historical epistemologist can say is that the authors ofthis period act as if they were following rules of this sort. No one can denyhim his right to interpret historical events on this pattern. But if we are tospeak here of an historical a priori, then we can mean by this at most the apriori of the historian. An essential feature of this notion in Husserl—thatthe historical a priori was binding on the historical actors—has gone miss-ing. With it has gone the possibility of any properly normative stance to-wards these past scienti�c cultures. And that is just the criticism thatCanguilhem levels at Kuhn.

My conclusion is that Foucault’s theory of science, at least up until thepoint that he wrote the Archaeology of Knowledge, was largely de�nedthrough his rejection of Husserl’s model, a rejection that he and others


found in their reading of Cavaillès. And though that rejection is wellgrounded in the critique of transcendental logic and of the philosophy ofconsciousness that we �nd there, it retains too much of Husserl’s historicalepistemology for it to be coherent. For the notion of an unconscious a pri-ori deliberately preserves features of the transcendentalist philosophies itwas supposed to help supplant. These features—the notion of an a priori,and of the simultaneous constitution of logic, rationality and a �eld of ob-jects—are located, as Foucault explicitly maintains, neither on the level offacts, nor on that of consciousness. If they are conditions of knowledge, theknowledge they condition is most likely our own. That this terminologyis absent from Foucault’s later work is no doubt a re�ection of his ownmisgivings in this regard.18

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cogito.” Critique, 242:599–618.———. 1977. “Le rôle de l’épistémologie dans l’historiographie

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Cavaillès, Jean. 1936. “Le congrès international de philosophie des sci-ences.” Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 43:118–120.

———. 1960. Sur la logique et la théorie des sciences. Paris: Pressesuniversitaires de France.

———. 1981. Méthode axiomatique et formalisme. Paris: Hermann.Colette, Jacques. 1998. “Paradoxes et apories de la notion d’a priori

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Foucault, Michel. 1966. Les mots et les choses. Paris: Gallimard.———. 1969. L’archéologie du savoir. Paris: Gallimard.———. 1994a. “Foucault répond à Sartre.” In Dits et Écrits. Edited by

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18. “Si, par la suite, Foucault n’utilise plus le concept d’a priori historique, peut-être en-core trop évocateur de la phénoménologie, c’est sans doute pour avoir pris conscience nonde l’inutilité de l’entreprise, mais de ses limitations. A la �n il évoquait, mais de manièreprogrammatique seulement une ontologie historique . . . ” (Colette 1998). I am indebtedto Prof. Colette for providing me a copy of his unpublished manuscript.

Gutting, Gary. 1989. Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Scienti�c Reason. Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press.

Husserl, Edmund. 1939. “Die Frage nach dem Ursprung der Geometrieals intentionalhistorisches Problem.” Revue Internationale de Philosophie,(2):203–225. Reprinted as an appendix to (Husserl 1962).

———. 1962. Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und dietranszendentale Phänomenologie. Vol. 6, Husserliana. The Hague: MartinusNijhoff.

Hyder, David. 2003. “Physique et logique transcendantale chez Kant,Hertz et Wittgenstein.” In Hertz et Wittgenstein. Edited by G. Garettaand J.-J. Rosat. Paris: J. Vrin.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1960. “Sur la phénoménologie du langage.” InSignes. Paris: Gallimard.

Norris, Christopher. 1994. “‘What is Enlightenment?’ Kant andFoucault.” In The Cambridge Companion to Foucault. Edited byG. Gutting. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pos, H.-J. 1939. “Phénoménologie et linguistique.” Revue Internationale dePhilosophie, (2):354–365.

Sinaceur, Hourya. 1994. Jean Cavaillès, philosophie, mathématique. Paris:Presses universitaires de France.


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51242672 David Hyder Foucault Cavailles and Husserl on the Historical Epistemology of the Sciences