Epistemes
Episteme is etymologically derived from the Greek ἐπιστήμη and means "knowledge", "knowledge" or "science". It comes from the verb ἐπίσταμαι , which means "to know".
Plato and Aristotle
Plato justifies the superiority of general thinking compared to the accidental of bodily sensory perception. Aristotle , too, distinguishes knowledge from sensory perception and mere opinion. In his Nicomachean Ethics, however, he uses the term episteme in a narrower sense in order to delimit it as theoretical knowledge from techne , practical ability. Previously, the two terms were used more or less synonymously. In the Nicomachean Ethics , Episteme and Techne are two of the five basic attitudes of the soul that are needed to understand what is right. The others are: Phronesis (moral, practical insight; understanding), Sophia (philosophical wisdom) and Nous (intuitive understanding; spiritual comprehension; reason).
Eric Voegelin
The political scientist and historian Eric Voegelin takes up the term episteme again in the large-scale attempt to construct a “new science of politics” with the old methods of the Classical period, especially Aristotle. He grasps Aristotle's concept of science in an unusual breadth and understands by it, among other things, the exploration of the metaxy , the existential tension in humans, between immanence and transcendence through the nous (reason).
Michel Foucault
The philosopher Michel Foucault used the term episteme in his work The Order of Things in a special meaning. He means the historical a priori , which is the foundation of knowledge and its discourses . It thus represents the condition of the possibility of knowledge within a certain epoch.
The fundamental codes of a culture that dominate its language, its schemes of perception, its exchange, its techniques, its values, the hierarchies of its practices, fix the empirical orders for every person right from the start, with which he has to deal and in which he himself will find again.
In the following writings, Foucault has made it clear that several epistemes as parts of different power / knowledge systems exist at the same time and can interact with one another. However, he did not discard the concept:
[I could] define the episteme [...] as a strategic dispositive that allows to filter out from all possible statements those that can be and of which one will say within, I am not saying: a scientific theory, but a field of scientific research can: This one is true or false. The episteme is the dispositive that makes it possible to distinguish not the true from the false, but the scientifically qualifiable from the non-qualifiable.
Foucault's use of the term episteme is similar to Thomas S. Kuhn's term paradigm , such as B. Jean Piaget pointed out.
See also
Individual evidence
- ↑ Phaidon 78b 4-79.
- ↑ De Anima II.5
- ↑ Wilfried Fiedler: Analogy models in Aristoteles (1978, p. 169)
- ↑ Michel Foucault: The order of things (Suhrkamp, 1974, p. 22)
- ↑ Michel Foucault: Dispositive of power. Michel Foucault on sexuality, knowledge and truth (1978, p. 124)
- ^ Jean Piaget: Structuralism . (1973)