‘Verbose dialectics’ and the Anthropological Circle: Michel Foucault and Jean Hyppolite

The essay tries to explain the epistemological changes occurred to Michel Foucaut's work between the mid-50s, when he published his first book, the Marxist and humanist Maladie mentale et personnalité and the beginning of the 60s, when he defended his Ph.D. dissertation, Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique (1961), marked by a frank anti-humanism. The hypothesis is that Foucault had been marked not only by the reading of Nietzsche, but especially of Heidegger's "second" philosophy. An important figure that introduced him to his author was Jean Hyppolite, whose importance in French philosophy had often undervalued.