What is Michel Foucault's episteme?

The paper considers the notion of Foucault's episteme in his "Order of things." Even if Foucault himself has abandoned the notion of "episteme" for other concepts such the "archive", "discourse" or "dispositive", it remains one of the most important methodological points in his intellectual biography. If we consider Foucault as a philosopher, we have to analyze how Foucault dialogizes or polemicizes with eminent philosophical movements of his time: phenomenology, existentialism, marxism. We have to take in consideration the most influential Foucault's commentators, ex.g.: E. Balibar, B.Han, G.Le Brun, G.Canguilhem, J.-G.Merquoir. The archeology of Foucault contests a long humanistic tradition that postulates the common nature of human being and the continuity of rational knowledge. Not only romantics or positivist thinkers, but even a materialist philosopher like Marx was, admitted an emancipation of human being and an accumulation of knowledge as a real background of progress. Our aim is to prove that the episteme notion is not only deconstructive one but contains a mighty potential to demonstrate fundamental structures of thought, history and being. Firstly, it is not occasionally that for discovering episteme Foucault explores sciences about language, economy and life and not mathematics or physics. It proves that these sciences have to do with particular historical reality. Secondly Fou-cault considers philosophical theories as epiphenomena of episteme. So the episteme has a particular ontological status, it is a priori and necessary; it is a complex conscious and subconscious structure of practices, institutions and knowledge. The very center of Foucault's archeological epistemology is the classical episteme. In this point the Foucault's work has much in common with the Heidegger's "Age of the World Picture". Another question is about the succession of epistemes. Foucault distinguished three epistemes: the pre-classical, classical and modern ("anthropocentrical") ones. It is possible to see how the epistemological discontinuities work at the empirical level. The applied sciences often meet difficulties to think the reasons of structural changes and cannot explain why they abandon an idea for another one. The actual difficulties to re-think the human and social sciences seem to due to this discontinue character of knowledge, as Foucault wrote.

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