The Normal and the Pathological

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 earl...

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.

乔治·康吉莱姆（1904—1995），法国思想家，曾就读于法国巴黎高等师范学院和斯特拉斯堡大学，获医学博士学位，，先后任教于多所中学和斯特拉斯堡大学、索邦大学。其主要研究领域是科学史和科学哲学（认识论）。主要著作有《正常与病态》、《生命的知识》、《17—18世纪反射观念 的形成》、《从发展到19世纪的进化》、《科学史和科学哲学研究》、《生命科学史中的意识形态和理性》、《健康：普通概念，哲学问题》。康吉莱姆是法国当代思想的开创者之一，其思想和研究方法对阿尔都塞、福柯、德勒兹等人产生了重大影响。

李春，文学博士，暨南大学翻译学院教师。主要研究领域为中国现代文学、中国翻译史和翻译理论、已出版译著《空间与政治》、《策兰与海德格尔：一场悬而未决的对话（1951—1970）》。