The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences

Paul-Michel Foucault was born in 1926 to an upper-middle-class family in Poitiers, France. In his twenties, Foucault studied under Jean Hyppolite, a notable existentialist philosopher and a mentor to many famous post-World War II French thinkers. While Foucault attended university, he acquired multiple degrees in philosophy and psychology, culminating in a Doctor of Philosophy degree and the equivalent of a master’s degree in psychology. Foucault developed a keen interest in the history of science during his education.

Many of the thinkers and philosophers that Foucault discusses in The Order of Things had an impact on his own philosophy and methodology. Karl Marx, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, G. W. F. Hegel, and Sigmund Freud all appear as paradigms for their respective epistemes in The Order of Things. Transcendental Idealism (Kant and Hegel) and psychoanalysis (Freud with his study of the unconscious mind) were of particular interest to Foucault. Foucault approached the transcendental philosophy of Kant through the lenses of psychoanalysis and the history of science. This interest in the internal workings of the mind and theories of knowledge production led Foucault to place the “empirico-transcendental doublet” (347) of humanity at the heart of the modern

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