Episteme

Episteme is etymologically derived from the Greek ἐπιστήμη, meaning " knowledge" or "science". It comes from the verb ἐπίσταμαι, which means "know".

Aristotle

Aristotle uses the term episteme in his Nicomachean Ethics to him in a narrower sense than theoretical knowledge to Techne, the practical ability to delineate. Previously, the two terms were used more or less interchangeably. In the Nicomachean Ethics Episteme and Techne are two of the five basic positions of the soul that are needed to detect the right one. The others are: phronesis ( moral, practical insight, comprehension ), Sophia ( philosophical wisdom ) and nous ( intuitive mind, intellectual capture, reason).

Michel Foucault

The philosopher Michel Foucault used the term episteme in his work The Order of Things in a special importance. He means the historical a priori, which establishes the knowledge and its discourses. It thus represents the condition of the possibility of knowledge within a particular era.

" The fundamental codes of a culture that dominate their language, their schemes of perception, its exchanges, its techniques, its values ​​, the hierarchy of its practices, secure at the beginning of every man, the empirical orders with which he have to do and in which he will find himself. "

In the following writings Foucault has made it clear that several Episteme exist as parts of various power / knowledge systems at the same time and can interact with each other. However, he has not rejected the concept:

[ I could ] the Episteme [ ... ] define a strategic dispositive, which allows among all possible statements to filter out those who are within, I do not say may be acceptable to a scientific theory, but a field of science and of which they shall say, may: this one is true or false. The episteme is the dispositif that allows not just the true from the false, but the scientific qualifiable to distinguish from non- qualifiable.

Foucault's use of the term episteme has similarities to Thomas Kuhn's concept of paradigm, as has been shown, for example, Jean Piaget.