Abstract

Epistemology was a central concern of Michel Foucault. By denying the conflation of knowledge with power, and consistently maintaining a dyadic relationship (“power/knowledge”) rather than a relationship in which power eclipses knowledge, Foucault maintains that knowledge requires its own analysis irreducible to the strategic maneuvers of power. “Epistemology,” by this caricature, has to approach the question of knowledge as a transcendent entity, akin to Plato's Ideal Forms. Foucault's work on knowledge is primarily critical rather than normatively reconstructive. The most important and influential of his ideas was Foucault's claim that power and knowledge are co‐constituting: “that power and knowledge directly imply one another ”. The chapter also explores some of Foucault's case studies, which reveal general claims about the nature of truth and knowledge.