The Order of Things Michel Foucault

In The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences Foucault wrote that a historical period is characterized by epistemes — ways of thinking about truth and about discourse — which are common to the fields of knowledge, and determine what ideas it is possible to conceptualize and what ideas it is acceptable to affirm as true. That the acceptable ideas change and develop in the course of time, manifested as paradigm shifts of intellectualism, for instance between the "Classical Age"[1] and "Modernity" (from Kant onwards) — which is the period considered by Foucault in the book — is support for the thesis that every historical period has underlying epistemic assumptions, ways of thinking that determined what is truth and what is rationally acceptable.

• Concerning language: from general grammar to linguistics
• Concerning living organisms: from natural history to biology
• Concerning money: from the science of wealth to economics[2]

Foucault analyzes three epistemes:

1. The episteme of the Renaissance, characterized by resemblance and similitude
2. The episteme of the Classical era, characterized by representation and ordering, identity and difference, as categorization and taxonomy
3. The episteme of the Modern era, the character of which is the subject of the book

In the Classical-era episteme, the concept of "man" was not yet defined. Man was not subject to a distinct epistemological awareness.[3] Classical thought, and previous ones, were able to talk about the mind and the body, about the human being, and about his very limited place in the universe, about all the limits of knowledge and his freedom, but none of them have ever known man as modern thought has done. The humanism of the Renaissance, the rationalism of the "classics" assigned human beings a privileged place in the order of the world, but they did not think of man.[4] This happened only with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, when the entire Western episteme was overturned. The connection between "positivity and finitude", the duplication of the empirical and the transcendental, the "perpetual reference of the cogito to the unthought", the "retreat and the return of the origin", define, for Foucault, man's way of being, because now reflection tries to philosophically found the possibility of knowledge on the analysis of this way of being and no longer on that of representation.[5]