Who decides what counts as knowledge? Why can a medical diagnosis, a scientific classification or an official record transform a life, while the same words spoken elsewhere carry no authority? And how do societies come to recognise madness, disease, sexuality or criminality as things that can be identified, measured and investigated?

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Few twentieth-century thinkers changed the way we approach these questions as Michel Foucault. His work transformed philosophy, history and the human sciences by showing that knowledge is never just a collection of discoveries about objects. The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) is the methodological key to Foucault's early work and one of his boldest attempts to rethink what history itself can do.

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We tend to imagine the history of ideas as a continuous story in which great thinkers influence one another and knowledge gradually moves forward. Foucault claims that history moves at different speeds: governments may collapse in days, while medical practices, institutional routines and ways of classifying people can persist for centuries. At other moments, the rules of knowledge can shift dramatically, changing not only the answers we give but the objects we perceive and the questions we are able to ask.

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Archaeology studies these rules by beginning not with authors or celebrated books, but with statements: diagnoses, case histories, classifications, theories, regulations, official records and other things that were actually said, recorded and circulated. Foucault asks how statements are organised into series, how they acquire authority, how they are repeated or forgotten, and why one statement appeared at a particular moment rather than another.

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A medical diagnosis, for example, derives its force from the identity of the one who speaks, from which institution, using which procedures, forms of observation and accepted concepts. The same sentence uttered by another person, in another place, may have an entirely different status. For Foucault, discourse is therefore not just a language describing reality, it is a practice that helps form the objects about which it speaks and the positions from which someone can speak with authority.

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This changes how we approach many fields of knowledge, including madness, illness, sexuality and crime. Rather than assuming that these objects remained essentially the same while our knowledge of them improved, Foucault asks how they became visible in particular ways, how distinctions between the normal and the abnormal were established, and how figures such as the doctor, psychiatrist and scientist acquired the right to define them. He is not claiming that truth is arbitrary, but rather asking what historical practices must already be in place before something can be tested, demonstrated and accepted as true.

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These questions have acquired new urgency in a world of databases, search engines, digital platforms and artificial intelligence. Such systems have never been neutral platforms of information. They classify statements, rank sources, create connections and shape what becomes visible, credible and repeatable. Foucault gives us a powerful way to ask how truth is organised and how our own systems of knowledge might have been otherwise.

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This online course offers an accessible and rigorous introduction to Foucault's early work through a close reading of this landmark text. We will explore the statement, discursive formations, the historical a priori, the archive, knowledge and scientificity, while connecting The Archaeology of Knowledge to Foucault's most celebrated works such as Madness and Civilisation, The Birth of the Clinic, The Order of Things and Foucault's later investigations of power. The course provides both a grounding in contemporary Continental philosophy and a set of tools for questioning how our own present produces its facts, experts and truths.