“'Verbose Dialectics' and the Anthropological Circle: Michel Foucault and Jean Hyppolite.” Giuseppe Bianco Translated by Paul Rekret Having already served as director of the École Normale Supérieure for ten years, in April 1963 Jean Hyppolite was elected professor of the Collège de France. Among the congratulatory letters from his former students held in the Fonds Jean Hyppolite is that of Michel Foucault, then Maître de conférences in psychology at the University of Clermont-Ferrand. In it, Foucault confides to Hyppolite the significance this event held for his generation: his teacher was for them, he writes, the ‘sole philosophical model’. 1 This verdict is reaffirmed in the course of the address Foucault gave in honour of Hyppolite at the École Normale on 9 th January 1969 2 and even more strongly the following year in ‘The Order of Discourse,’ his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France. 3 There Foucault declared that all of the ‘philosophical problems’ that his generation had found themselves having to address had been posed by Hyppolite in his 1953 book, Logic and Existence, 4 a book from which, Foucault added, he had drawn the very ‘meaning and possibility’ of his work. 5 1Letter dated 15 th April 1963, Fonds Jean Hyppolite, Library of the École Normale Superieure. 2Michel Foucault, “Jean Hyppolite. 1907-1968.” In Dits et écrits, Vol.1. (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), pp.779-85. 3Michel Foucault, “The Order of Discourse,” trans. by Ian McLeod in Robert Young, ed., Untying the Text: A Post- Structuralist Reader , (Routledge: London, 1981), pp.48-78. 4Michel Foucault, “Jean Hyppolite. 1907-1968,” in Dits et écrits, op. cit. Vol.1. p. 785 5‘There are many of us that owe him a debt.’ Michel Foucault, “The Order of Discourse,” p.76 – translation modified.