Foucaults conception of philosophy, in which the study of truth is inseparable from

the study of history, is thoroughly at odds with the prevailing conception of what
philosophy is.

Truth is a major theme in Foucault's work, in particular in the context of its relations with power,
knowledge and the subject. He argues that truth is an event which takes place in history. It is
something that 'happens', and is produced by various techniques (the 'technology' of truth) rather
than something that already exists and is simply waiting to be discovered. Foucault argues that
'the effect of truth' he wants to produce consists in 'showing that the real is polemical'. Foucault
further notes that he is not interested in 'telling the truth', in his writing; rather, he is interested in
inviting people to have a particular experience for themselves.
Kant himself, who thought that representations (thoughts or ideas) were themselves
the product of (constituted by) the mind. Not, however, produced by the mind as
a natural or historical reality, but as belonging to a special epistemic realm:
transcendental subjectivity. Kant thus maintained the Classical insistence that
knowledge cannot be understood as a physical or historical reality, but he located
the grounds of knowledge in a domain (the transcendental) more fundamental than
the ideas it subtended. (We must add, of course, that Kant also did not think of this
domain as possessing a reality beyond the historical and the physical; it was not
metaphysical.
freed from its subordination to ideas, language can be treated (as it had been in the
Renaissance) as an autonomous realityindeed as even more deeply autonomous
than Renaissance language, since there is no system of resemblances binding it to
the world. In this sense, language is a truth unto itself, speaking nothing other than
its own meaning. This is the realm of pure literature, evoked by Mallarm when he
answered Nietzsche's (genealogical) question, Who is speaking? with, Language
itself. In contrast to the Renaissance, however, there is no divine Word underlying
and giving unique truth to the words of language. Literature is literally nothing but
languageor rather many languages, speaking for and of themselves.
human beings were conceived as the locus of knowledge (i.e., it is humans who
possessed the ideas that represented the world
Kant, who put forward the following crucial idea: that the very factors that make us
finite (our subjection to space, time, causality, etc.) are also conditions necessary
for the possibility of knowledge
grounding our knowledge of empirical truths in the reality of the transcendental
subject- kant
Descartes' idea of the cogito as a sovereign transparency of pure consciousness.

Thought is no longer pure representation and therefore cannot be separated from

an unthought (i.e., the given empirical and historical truths about who we are). I
can no longer go from I think to I am because the content of my reality (what I
am) is always more than the content of any merely thinking self