Classical episteme

The classical episteme is the archaeological layer of Western knowledge that Michel Foucault identified in The Order of Things — the grid of unconscious rules governing thought from the mid-seventeenth to the late eighteenth century. Its governing principle was representation: the arrangement of differences into ordered tables where each thing finds its place relative to every other thing. This was the age of natural history, general grammar, and the analysis of wealth — disciplines that treated knowledge as the systematic ordering of visible identities and differences. The classical episteme made empiricism possible not as a philosophical discovery but as a structural feature of an age that believed the world was fundamentally transparent to a well-ordered gaze.