The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences

With 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.

Author: Michel Foucault
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 03/29/1994
Pages: 416
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.66lbs
Size: 8.03h x 5.17w x 0.86d
ISBN13: 9780679753353
ISBN10: 0679753354
BISAC Categories:
- Philosophy | History & Surveys | Modern
- Philosophy | Individual Philosophers
- Social Science | Sociology | Social Theory

About the Author
Michel Foucault was born in Poitiers, France, in 1926. He lecturerd in universities throughout the world; served as director at the Institut Francais in Hamburg, Germany and at the Institut de Philosophi at the Faculte des Lettres in the University of Clermont-Ferrand, France; and wrote frequently for French newspapers and reviews. At the time of his death in 1984, he held a chair at France's most prestigious institutions, the College de France.