Episteme

The Greek word episteme is often translated as knowledge or science. The idea of the episteme is not new. It was previously elaborated by Giambattista Vico in the eighteenth century. He argued that we can have any degree of certainty only about that which we have ourselves created. Knowledge and history emerge from our own social constructions. In this instance, Michel Foucault in his work, The Order of Things uses the term episteme to designate how a culture acquires and organises knowledge in a given historical period.

Foucault maintains that knowledge is generated through the sense of difference. Foucault organised the knowledge into four historical epistemes that existed from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries: Renaissance, Classical, Modern/Anthropological, and Postmodern. Foucault assumes that the four epistemes appeared in parallel.

The first episteme, from the Middle Ages to the late sixteenth century (the Renaissance), characterises knowledge according to the dominant cultural or linguistic narratives. 

In the second episteme, from the seventeenth century to the eighteenth (the Classical), knowledge was generated according to the linguistic practice of the representation of differentness. 

The third episteme (the Modern or Anthropological), from the end of the eighteenth century through to the early twentieth, and was preoccupied with Man (‘I’, the ‘self’) as the subject and object of reality. This preoccupation is, for Foucault, best understood through the invention of the knowing subject and the discipline of history. 

The fourth eisteme, the postmodern period, is represented by multiple realities and differences.  Foucault remarks man as the product of his lived social experience, and also the constitutor of knowledge.