The order of things : an archaeology of the human sciences / Michel Foucault.

By: Foucault, Michel, 1926-1984.

Material type: materialTypeLabel

BookPublisher: London : Routledge, 2008Description: xxvi, 422 p. ; 21 cm.ISBN: 9780415267373 .Subject(s): Learning and scholarship

| Knowledge, Theory of

| Postmodernism

DDC classification: 901.9

Holdings
Item type	Current library	Call number	Copy number	Status	Date due	Barcode	Item holds
General Lending	MTU Crawford College of Art and Design Library Lending	901.9 (Browse shelf(Opens below))	1	Checked out	19/02/2024	00194012

Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

When one defines "order" as a sorting of priorities, it becomes beautifully clear as to what Foucault is doing here. With virtuoso showmanship, he weaves an intensely complex history of thought. He dips into literature, art, economics and even biology in The Order of Things, possibly one of the most significant, yet most overlooked, works of the twentieth century. Eclipsed by his later work on power and discourse, nonetheless it was The Order of Things that established Foucault's reputation as an intellectual giant. Pirouetting around the outer edge of language, Foucault unsettles the surface of literary writing. In describing the limitations of our usual taxonomies, he opens the door onto a whole new system of thought, one ripe with what he calls "exotic charm". Intellectual pyrotechnics from the master of critical thinking, this book is crucial reading for those who wish to gain insight into that odd beast called Postmodernism, and a must for any fan of Foucault.

Originally published: London: Tavistock, 1970.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

Publishers Note
Forward to the English Edition
Preface
Part I
1 Las Meninas
2 The Prose of the World
I The Four Similitudes
II Signatures
III The Limits of the World
IV The Writing of Things
V The Being of Language
3 Representing
I Don Quixote
II Order
III The Representation of the Sign
IV Duplicated Representation
V The Imagination of Resemblance
VI Mathesis and 'Taxinoma'
4 Speaking
I Criticism and Commentary
II General Grammar
III The Theory of the Verb
IV Articulation
V Designation
VI Derivation
VII The Quadrilateral Language
5 Classifying
I What the Historians say
II Natural History
III Structure
IV Character
V Continuity and Catastrophe
VI Monsters and Fossils
VII The Discourse of Nature
6 Exchanging
I The Analysis of wealth
II Money and Prices
III Mercantilism
IV The Pledge and the Price
V The Creation of Value
VI Utility
VII General Table
VIII Desire and Representation
Part 2
7 The Limits of Representation
I The Age of History
II The Measure of Labour
III The Organic Structure of Beings
IV Word Inflection
V Ideology and Criticism
VI Objective Synthesis
8 Labour, life, Language
I The New Empiricities
II Ricardo
III Cuvier
IV Bopp
V Language Became Object
9 Man and His Doubles
I The return of Language
II The Place of the King
III The Analytic of Finitude
IV The Empirical and the Transcendental
V The 'Cogito' and the Unthought
VI The Retreat and the Return of the Origin
VII Discourse and Man's Being
VIII The Anthropological Sleep
10 The Human Sciences
I The Three Faces of Knowledge
II The Form of the Human Sciences
III The Three Models
IV History
V Psychoanalysis and Ethnology
VI In Conclusion

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Michel Foucault was born on October 15, 1926, in Poitiers, France, and was educated at the Sorbonne, in Paris. He taught at colleges all across Europe, including the Universities of Lill, Uppsala, Hamburg, and Warsaw, before returning to France. There he taught at the University of Paris and the College of France, where he served as the chairman of History of Systems of Thought until his death.

Regarded as one of the great French thinkers of the twentieth century, Foucault's interest was in the human sciences, areas such as psychiatry, language, literature, and intellectual history. He made significant contributions not just to the fields themselves, but to the way these areas are studied, and is particularly known for his work on the development of twentieth-century attitudes toward knowledge, sexuality, illness, and madness.

Foucault's initial study of these subjects used an archaeological method, which involved sifting through seemingly unrelated scholarly minutia of a certain time period in order to reconstruct, analyze, and classify the age according to the types of knowledge that were possible during that time. This approach was used in Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, for which Foucault received a medal from France's Center of Scientific Research in 1961, The Birth of the Clinic, The Order of Things, and The Archaeology of Knowledge.

Foucault also wrote Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison, a study of the ways that society's views of crime and punishment have developed, and The History of Sexuality, which was intended to be a six-volume series. Before he could begin the final two volumes, however, Foucault died of a neurological disorder in 1984.

(Bowker Author Biography)