Foucault was born in Poitiers, France, on october 15, 1926. His student years seem to have been ychologically tormented but were intellectually brilliant. He became academically established during the 1960s, when he held a series of positions at French universities, before his election 1969 to the ultra-prestigious College de France, where he was Professor of the History of Systems of Thought until his death From the 1970s on, Foucault was very active politically. He was a founder of the Groupe d'information sur les prisons and often protested on behalf of homosexuals and other marginalized groups He frequently lectured outside France, particularly the United States, and in 1983 had agreed to teach annually at the University of California at Berkeley An early victim of AIDS, Foucault died in Paris on June 25, 1984 In addition to works published during his lifetime, his lectures at the College de France, being published posthumously, contain important elucidations and extensions of his ideas It can be difficult to think of Foucault as a philosopher His academic formation was in psychology and its history as much as in philosophy, his books were mostly histories of medical and social sciences, his passions were literary and political. Nonetheless, almost all of Foucault's works can be fruitfully read as philosophical in either or both of two ways: as a carrying out of philosophy's traditional critical project in a new(historical) manner, and as a critical engagement with the thought of traditional philosophers. This article will present him as a philosopher in these two dimensions