ABSTRACT
Foucault’s investigation of the emergence of human sciences in The Order of
Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences has been ground-breaking and
widely persuasive. In the foreword of the English edition (1970), he points out
that this book addresses a neglected field, as the history of science traditionally
discusses the rigorous sciences of mathematics, cosmology and physics, in
whose history one can observe ‘the almost uninterrupted emergence of truth
and pure reason’ (1991: ix). Other disciplines, those concerning human beings,
languages or economy, have been considered too exposed to the vagueness of
empirical thought, chance, imagery or tradition to be considered sciences and as
such to have a history of relevance to knowledge. It is this empirical, non-exact
and uncertain kind of knowledge based on evidence of unstable discourses
– such as the state of mind, intellectual fashions, combination of archaisms,
conjecture and intuition – that he writes about in The Order of Things.
