Page "Georges Canguilhem" Paragraph 7

As Inspector General and then President of the Jury d ' Agrégation in philosophy, Canguilhem had a tremendous and direct influence over philosophical instruction in France in the latter half of the twentieth century and was known to more than a generation of French academic philosophers as a demanding and exacting evaluator who, as Louis Althusser remarked, believed he could correct the philosophical understanding of teachers by bawling them out.

This belief did not prevent him from being regarded with considerable affection by the generation of intellectuals that came to the fore in the 1960s, including Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, and Jacques Lacan.

Althusser once wrote to his English translator that " my debt to Canguilhem is incalculable " ( italics in the original, from Economy and Society 27, page 171 ).

Likewise, Foucault, in his introduction to Canguilhem's The Normal and the Pathological, wrote: