The Normal and the Pathological

Georges Canguilhem

ISBN 10: 0942299590 / ISBN 13: 9780942299595

Published by Zone Books October 1991, 1991

About this Item

used trade paperback edition. lightly shelfworn, corners perhaps slightly bumped. pages and binding are clean, straight and tight. there are no marks to the text or other serious flaws.

Seller Inventory # 1153900

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Normal and the Pathological
• Publisher: Zone Books October 1991
• Publication Date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0942299590
• ISBN 13: 9780942299595
• Binding: Trade Paperback
• Condition: VG
• Seller catalogs:
  • philosophy

About this title

Synopsis

The Normal and the Pathological is one of the crucial contributions to the history of science in the last half century. It takes as its starting point the sudden appearance of biology as a science in the nineteenth century and examines the conditions determining its particular makeup.

Canguilhem analyzes the radically new way in which health and disease were defined in the early nineteenth century, showing that the emerging categories of the normal and the pathological were far from objective scientific concepts. He demonstrates how the epistemological foundations of modern biology and medicine were intertwined with political, economic, and technological imperatives.

Canguilhem was an important influence on the thought of Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser, among others, in particular for the way in which he poses the problem of how new domains of knowledge come into being and how they are part of a discontinuous history of human thought.

About the Author

Georges Canguilhem is Professor Emeritus at the Sorbonne and former director of the Institut d'Histoire des Sciences et des Techniques de l'Université de Paris. His works include La Connaissance de la Vie, Ideology and Rationality in the History of the Life Sciences, and The Normal and the Pathological.