Philosopher
The Order of Things
Overview
The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (French: Les Mots et les Choses – Une archéologie des sciences humaines) is a 1966 book by French philosopher Michel Foucault. It proposes that every historical period has underlying epistemic assumptions, ways of thinking, which determine what is truth and what is acceptable discourse about a subject, by delineating the origins of biology, economics, and linguistics. The introduction to the origins of the human sciences begins with detailed, forensic analyses and discussion of the complex networks of sightlines, hidden-ness, and representation that exist in the group painting Las Meninas (The Ladies-in-waiting, 1656) by Diego Velázquez. Foucault's application of the analyses shows the structural parallels in the similar developments in perception that occurred in researchers' ways of seeing the subject in the human sciences.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Philosophers who discussed The Order of Things
Ideas The Order of Things discusses
- Immanuel Kant
- Idea
- Jean-Paul Sartre
- Transcendence (philosophy)
- Linguistics
- Knowledge
- Paradigm shift
- Perception
- René Descartes
- Renaissance
- Thomas Kuhn
- Truth
- Intelligentsia
- The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
- Critique of Pure Reason
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Cultural history
- Discourse
- Michel Foucault
- Rationalism
- Episteme
- Cogito, ergo sum
- Diego Velázquez
- Identity (philosophy)
Place in the tradition
Part of Philosophy of science.