Abstract

This article deals with the importance that Foucault attributes to the Critic of Pure Reason, in his book, The Order of Things . According to Foucault, the Critic occupies a symbolic place because of the problematic of finitude that this work inaugurates in the history of philosophy. First of all, Kant thinks about finitude from itself, and this differentiates him from Descartes, to whom this concept is referred to the infinite. Then, the Kantian finite transcendental subject is not an empirical one, in contrast to the modern analyses of finitude, which confuse the empirical with the transcendental. In this respect, the Critic does not belong to the Classical Age any longer, because it bypasses the representation. But it cannot be included in the modern analyses of finitude either, such as those of the naturalistic positivism, the dialectic, and the phenomenology. Foucault thus suggests that the Critic brings with itself the possibility of an anthropology, in the sense it is a thought that imparts a transcendental value to the empirical contents, even if it does not belong to them