This has clear implications for phenomenology, existentialism, Marxism and metaphysics generally, all of which dominated French philosophy and social sciences during Foucault's youth.

Another (which is just another version of the same oversight) has been to turn anthropology into a positive field which would serve as the basis for and the possibility of all the human sciences, whereas in fact it can only speak the language of limit and negativity: its sole purpose is to convey, from the vigour of critical thought to the transcendental foundation, the precedence of finitude.

[5]This concern with anthropology as "limit and negativity" would animate Foucault's future work: The Order of Things would continue his critique of the doubling of man as subject and object in the form of the "Analytic of Finitude",[6] whilst work such as The Birth of the Clinic or Madness and Civilization both outline the emergence of anthropological institutions that sought to order humans negatively, as objects to be limited, defined and restricted.

For instance, Foucault seems to have been mostly unaware of the proper historical contexts of Kant's anthropology: the lectures it was based upon, his discussion of the views of authors such as Christian Wolff, Alexander Baumgarten, David Hume, or Johann Nicolas Tetens, and the distinctive conception of the human sciences he developed as a result.

At the top of this list we should probably put Tetens' Versuch über die menschliche Natur (1777), Platner's Anthropology (1772), and of course Baumgarten's Psychologia Empirica (1749).