The Glossary of words and concepts of importance to the text
Order of Things, Preface from An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
by M. Foucault
Key words: culture, epistemes, knowledge,, taxonomies, human sciences, historical, Classical Age, modernity, sciences, fiction
All of these words were extracted as I reflected upon the text in consideration of my own research into cataloguing. While reading many of these words were confusing to me, I knew of their general meaning but found myself confused by their use in text, so looking up the definition opened up another rabbithole of researching and understanding the core of the text and the goal of my work.
- Aphasiac: a person suffering from a disorder that affects the ability to communicate, affected by or relating to difficulties in speaking, understanding speech, reading, or writing due to a disorder of the central nervous system
- Borges: as in Jorge Louis Borges, Argentinian short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator contributing to philosophical literature and the fantasy genre, influencing the magic realist movement
- Chimera: a thing which is hoped for but is illusory or impossible to achieve, taken from the Greek fire-breathing female monster with a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent’s tail
- Classical Age: period of European history characterised by the flourishing Roman and Greek civilisations of the Mediterranean, highlighting a peak of European colonisation
- Culture: social and traditional behaviours and ideas of a particular group of people
- Delineation: the action of describing or portraying something precisely, of indicating the exact position of a boundary
- (Chinese) Encyclopedia: book written with the intention of expanding and explaining upon a specific language (in this case Chinese)
- Episteme: the body of ideas that determine the knowledge that is intellectually certain at any particular time
- Fabula: a traditional story told through word of mouth
- Historical: of or concerning history or past events, relating to things that occurred before
- Human Sciences: a branch of study which deals with people or their actions, including the social sciences and the humanities, as contrasted with the natural sciences or physical sciences
- Incongruous: not in harmony or keeping with the surroundings or other aspects of something
- Modernity: a modern way of thinking, working, contemporariness
- Priori: knowledge that requires no evidence, considered to be true without being based on previous experience or observation
- Tabula: a plate or frame on which a title or inscription is carved
- Taxonomy: the branch of science concerned with classification, a scheme of classification
- Utopia: an imagined/conceptual world in which everything is perfect
The definitions are taken from a collection of sources including the Oxford Languages, Merriam-Webster, Wikitionary, Collins Dictionary as well as my own knowledge of words and their meaning. This gossary can be further expanded as one proceeds in reading the text past the preface and engaging the core content.