This book uncovers and explores the constant tension between the historical and the transcendental that lies at the heart of Michel Foucault's work. In the process, it also assesses the philosophical foundations of his thought by examining his theoretical borrowings from Kant, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, who each provided him with tools to critically rethink the status of the transcendental.
Given Foucault's constant focus on the (Kantian) question of the possibility for knowledge, the author argues that his philosophical itinerary can be understood as a series of attempts to historicize the transcendental. In so doing, he seeks to uncover a specific level that would identify these conditions without falling either into an excess of idealism (a de-historicized, subject-centered perspective exemplified for Foucault by Husserlian phenomenology) or of materialism (which would amount to interpreting these conditions as ideological and thus as the effect of economic determination by the infrastructure).
The author concludes that, although this problem does unify Foucault's work and gives it its specifically philosophical dimension, none of the concepts successively provided (such as the "episteme," the historical "a priori," the regimes of truth, the games of truth, and problematizations) manages to name these conditions without falling into the pitfalls that Foucault originally denounced as characteristic of the "anthropological sleep"--various forms of confusion between the historical and the transcendental. Although Foucault's work provides us with a highly illuminating analysis of the major problems of post-Kantian philosophies, ultimately it remains aporetic in that it also fails to overcome them.

This book will help clinicians acquire and develop the processes and skills of values-based practice. The aim of most patient-clinician consultations is to improve health outcomes. Often they succeed, and patients are satisfied and empowered. However, some consultations are unsatisfactory and result in failure to improve health outcomes and dissatisfaction on the part of patients, carers or clinicians. When consultations fail to achieve the desired results, the cause is not usually a failure of evidence-based practice. Today's clinicians are trained in evidence-based medicine, educated, updated and appraised. The most likely reason why things go wrong is a failure of values-based practice not ascertaining the relevant values perspectives and acting on them in a coherent and purposeful manner. If you rehearse and practise the elements of values-based practice detailed in this book, you will find your consultations more personally rewarding and your patients are likely to derive more benefit.