Michel Foucault's book The Order of Things examined the history of science to study how structures of epistemology, or episteme, shaped the way in which people imagined knowledge and knowing ( though Foucault would later explicitly deny affiliation with the structuralist movement ).

Foucault's use of episteme has been asserted as being similar to Thomas Kuhn's notion of a paradigm, as for example by Jean Piaget.

Whereas Kuhn's paradigm is an all-encompassing collection of beliefs and assumptions that result in the organization of scientific worldviews and practices, Foucault's episteme is not merely confined to science but to a wider range of discourse ( all of science itself would fall under the episteme of the epoch ).

While Kuhn's paradigm shifts are a consequence of a series of conscious decisions made by scientists to pursue a neglected set of questions, Foucault's epistemes are something like the ' epistemological unconscious ' of an era ; the configuration of knowledge in a particular episteme is based on a set of fundamental assumptions that are so basic to that episteme so as to be invisible to people operating within it.

This concept is important in philosophy of science and sociology of science in that it helps explain how scientific ideas change over time, similar to Thomas Kuhn's later notion of paradigm shift or Foucault's episteme.

Foucault's author function is the idea that an author exists only as a function of a written work, a part of its structure, but not necessarily part of the interpretive process.

Expanding upon Foucault's position, Alexander Nehamas writes that Foucault suggests " an author [...] is whoever can be understood to have produced a particular text as we interpret it ", not necessarily who penned the text.

Foucault's interpretation of governance is also very important in constructing theories of transnational power structure.

Michel Foucault's concept of discourse is closely related to social rules as it offers a possible explanation how these rules are shaped and change.

For example, Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization is both a history and an inspection of cultural attitudes about madness.

Foucault's relation to Heidegger is a matter of considerable difficulty ; Foucault acknowledged Heidegger as a philosopher whom he read but never wrote about.

The novel is mentioned at the very end of Michel Foucault's Life of infamous men.

The more common attempts to bracket out Foucault's writings on Iran as " miscalculations ," reminds some authors of what Foucault himself had criticized in his well known 1969 essay, " What is an Author?

Foucault's first biographer, Didier Eribon, described the philosopher as " a complex, many-sided character ", and that " under one mask there is always another ".

It is Foucault's only book-length work on literature.

Foucault's relation to structuralism is ambiguous.

The book is among Foucault's most successful and influential works.

The volume was almost complete before Foucault's death and a copy of it is privately held in the Foucault archive.

This is one of the ways that Foucault's work is linked to critical theory.

Philosopher Richard Rorty has argued that Foucault's ' archaeology of knowledge ' is fundamentally negative, and thus fails to adequately establish any ' new ' theory of knowledge per se.

In the northwest corner of the cathedral grounds is Copernicus ' tower, and in the southwest corner an octagonal building with a square bell tower and a small planetarium and a Foucault's pendulum.

The Foucault pendulum ( ), or Foucault's pendulum, named after the French physicist Léon Foucault, is a simple device conceived as an experiment to demonstrate the rotation of the Earth.

Michel Foucault's use of ' technologies of discourse ' and ' mechanisms of power ' describes how deliberation is either foreclosed or is a product of a series of technologies of discourse which produce a semblance of agency through the reproductions of power as they occur between individual subjects.

* Cagliostro is frequently alluded to in Umberto Eco's novel Foucault's Pendulum.

This displacement of discourse constitutes one of the bases of Foucault's thought: discourse is not tied to the subject, rather the " subject " is a construction of discourse.

* In Umberto Eco's novel Foucault's Pendulum, Alamut is described in detail towards the end of the novel.

This is the classic viewpoint on man and power, other studies show this as too overly simplistic or over hasty and there is no universal agreement or consensus on what ' human nature ' is or what it is supposed to be contrary to the classical view which views human nature as a continuum through time. Other research methods show Foucault's evidence as having sound basis towards Foucault's alleged minority or ' Utopian ' ' unconventional ' view

In fact, it was not coined by uniting words " gouvernement " and " mentalité ", but simply by making gouvernement into gouvernementalité just like musical into musicalité government +-al-adjective +-ité abstract noun ( see " Course Context " in Foucault's " Security " lectures ).

Many see the importance of Foucault's work as in its synthesis of this social / historical account of the operations of power ( see governmentality ).

For this reason, Althusser's " anti-humanism " and Foucault's statements were criticized, by Jürgen Habermas and others, for misunderstanding that this led to a fatalist conception of social determinism.

Foucault's Nietzschean critique of Enlightenment values in Les mots et les choses has been very influential in cultural studies and social work scholarship.

A Carceral archipelago ( meaning prison and a series of islands ) refers to social theorist Michel Foucault's work on surveillance systems and their technologies over modern societies and its practice of social control and discipline over its population in all areas of social life.

This view of truth as a political stake may be loosely associated with Heidegger or with Michel Foucault's specific analysis of historical and political discourse, as well as with some social constructivists.

To get to the body the mind had to be rendered docile, not the body, this error is due to the standard social science model an incorrect view which still persist to this day, that the mind and body, the so-called mind – body problem, or in philosophical circles dualism were separate and somehow in conflict with one another which needed to be controlled ( within whole populations rendering populations docile ) which was what Foucault's original concept of biopower was primarily concerned with.

This relates directly back to Machiavelli's The Prince, and Foucault's aforementioned conceptions of truth and power.

A general discussion by Anders Persson of various aspects of the coriolis effect, including Foucault's Pendulum and Taylor columns.

In this analysis, he heavily drew upon Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish.

Freemasonic writers added their own speculations in the 19th century, and further fictional embellishments have been added in popular novels such as Ivanhoe, Foucault's Pendulum, The Lost symbol, and The Da Vinci Code ; modern movies such as National Treasure and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade ; and video games such as Assassin's Creed and Broken Sword.

He refined Foucault's methods in 1926 using improved rotating mirrors to measure the time it took light to make a round trip from Mt.

As the seat of power, Coons has also been compared to Foucault's " panopticon.

In Foucault's opinion, the state had no essence.

Another important development was that of Foucault's analysis of the historical and scientific thought in The Order of Things and his study of power and corruption within the " science " of madness.

It remains a seminal work of conspiracy fiction, predating by years such novels as Foucault's Pendulum and The Da Vinci Code.

In Discursive Struggles Within Social Welfare: Restaging Teen Motherhood, Iara Lessa summarizes Foucault's definition of discourse as “ systems of thoughts composed of ideas, attitudes, courses of action, beliefs and practices that systematically construct the subjects and the worlds of which they speak.

In 1940, Foucault's mother took him from his previous school and enrolled him in the Collège Saint-Stanislas, a strict Roman Catholic institution run by the Jesuits ; here, he remained lonely, with few friends.

The École Normale Supérieure's doctor examined Foucault's state of mind, suggesting that his suicidal tendencies emerged from the distress surrounding his homosexuality, which at the time was legal but socially taboo in France.

It was critically acclaimed by the likes of Maurice Blochot, Michel Serres, Roland Barthes, Gaston Bachelard, and Fernand Braudel, but much to Foucault's upset, largely ignored in the leftist press.

Much of this thesis consisted of Foucault's discussion of textual dating – an " archaeology of the Kantian text " – although he rounded off the work with an evocation of Nietzche, who had become his biggest philosophical influence.

The university's philosophy department was then under the control of Jules Vuillemin ( 1920 – 2001 ), who had chosen him for the position after becoming impressed by Foucault's then unpublished doctoral dissertation.

It was in this stage of his life that Foucault met the young philosopher Daniel Defert ( 1937 –), and they would enter into a non-monogamous relationship that would last for the rest of Foucault's life.

In May 1963 he published a work entitled Raymond Rousell, which was devoted to the eponymous poet, novelist and playwright, who was one of Foucault's favourite authors.