The Historiographical Turn in 20th-Century Epistemology: Canguilhem, Foucault, and the Normalization of Pathological Life
Dimitrios K. Sarantopoulos1, Beatrix von Hohenlohe2
1. Department of Philosophy and History of Science, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece
2. Institute for History and Ethics of Medicine, Technical University of Munich, Germany
Abstract
Twentieth-century French historical epistemology radically transformed our conceptual understanding of the boundaries separating health from pathology. This paper investigates the philosophical lineage connecting Georges Canguilhem’s vitalist critique of biological normativity with Michel Foucault’s genealogical analysis of biopower and clinical institutionalization. Canguilhem famously argued that disease is not merely a quantitative variation of normal physiological function, but a novel normative capacity of the living organism striving to establish a new equilibrium under adverse environments. Building upon this foundational thesis, we examine how Foucault translated this epistemological critique into a political technology of population management, demonstrating how modern clinical medicine establishes statistical norms that simultaneously liberate and subjugate human bodies. Through close textual reading of *The Normal and the Pathological* and *The Birth of the Clinic*, we analyze how the medical gaze became deeply intertwined with state rationalities. We contend that this French epistemological tradition provides indispensable conceptual tools for contemporary bioethics, offering a robust counterweight to reductive biophysical models that frequently ignore the phenomenological and social dimensions of human suffering, disease ontology, and the political governance of biological life in advanced industrial societies.
Keywords
Georges Canguilhem; Michel Foucault; Historical Epistemology; Normativity; Biopolitics; Philosophy of Medicine