Michel Foucault (1926–1984), who was born in Poitiers, France on October 15 and died in Paris of AIDS on June 25, was a controversial philosopher whose interdisciplinary work has important if indirect implications for science, technology, and ethics. His research often changed directions—archaeology and genealogy as ideas, history of the present, problematization, and modes of subjectification were prominent. In his final years he viewed these directions as theoretical tools to examine three perennially related but distinct relations: to truth, to power, and to self. Foucault was sufficiently intrigued by various sciences and technologies to devote much of his work (and personal involvement) to analyzing and questioning how they increasingly engage formative and dangerous aspects of human life.

Michel Foucault, 1926–1984. The French philosopher, critic, and historian was an original and creative thinker who made contributions to historiography and to understanding the forces that make history. (© Corbis-Bettmann. Reproduced by permission...