“Curiosity is a vice that has been stigmatized in turn by Christianity, by philosophy and even by a certain conception of science. Curiosity, futility. I like the word however. To me it suggests something altogether different: it evokes “concern”; it evokes the care one takes for what exists and could exist; an acute sense of the real which, however, never becomes fixed; a readiness to find our surroundings strange and singular; a certain relentlessness in ridding ourselves of our familiarities and looking at things otherwise; a passion for seizing what is happening now and what is passing away; a lack of respect for traditional hierarchies of the important and the essential.”
– Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault is well known for his critiques of various social Institutions most notably psychiatry, medicine and the prison system, and also for his ideas on the history of sexuality. His general theories concerning power and the relation between power and knowledge, as well as his ideas concerning” discourse” in relation to the history of Western thought have been widely discussed and applied.
To learn more about this philosopher, have a look at
http://www.qut.edu.au/edu/cpol/foucault/ or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault