The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human SciencesWith vast erudition, Foucault cuts across disciplines and reaches back into seventeenth century to show how classical systems of knowledge, which linked all of nature within a great chain of being and analogies between the stars in the heavens and the features in a human face, gave way to the modern sciences of biology, philology, and political economy. The result is nothing less than an archaeology of the sciences that unearths old patterns of meaning and reveals the shocking arbitrariness of our received truths. In the work that established him as the most important French thinker since Sartre, Michel Foucault offers startling evidence that "man"—man as a subject of scientific knowledge—is at best a recent invention, the result of a fundamental mutation in our culture. |
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able according Adam Smith analogies analysis of wealth animals appear arrangement articulation basis become Benoît de Maillet biology character Classical age Classical thought common Condillac constituted continuity culture Cuvier define designation Destutt Destutt de Tracy discourse domain Don Quixote economics eighteenth century elements empirical Encyclopédie episteme epistemological established ethnology exchange existence experience fact figures finitude foundation function fundamental grammar human sciences Ibid identities and differences individual knowledge labour Lamarck language laws linked Linnaeus living longer man's mathesis means metal mode modern thought movement natural history nineteenth century object ontology organic structure origin philology philosophy Physiocrats Port-Royal positivity possible production proposition psychoanalysis pure quantity question reflection relation repre represent representation resemblance revealed role root sentation seventeenth signifying signs similitude sixteenth century space speak species taxinomia taxonomy theory things tion transcendental truth verb visible whole words