The Order of Things

The French philosopher Michel Foucault proposes that every historical period rests on underlying assumptions about knowledge, which he calls epistemes, that decide what can count as truth and acceptable discourse. He tests the idea by tracing how general grammar became linguistics, natural history became biology and the science of wealth became economics. He separates a Renaissance episteme built on resemblance, a Classical one built on representation, ordering and taxonomy, and the Modern one that is his main subject, arguing that man as an object of scientific knowledge is a recent invention. The introduction is a close reading of the sightlines and representation in Velazquez's painting Las Meninas. The French original is titled Les Mots et les Choses.

SOSV general partner Bill Liao said it changed his life forever by showing him that language is how people make the world.