I 61ff
Episteme in the 16th century: accumulation of knowledge, infinite accumulation of confirmations. Sandy ground. Only possible connection between the blocks is the addition.
Condemned to recognize only the same thing, but only to recognize it at the end of an infinite, never attained path.
Known category of microcosm: applies to all natural regions the game of the duplicated similarities.
The distance of the micro to the macrocosm can still be so great, it is not infinite. Nature, as a play of similarities and signs, closes in itself according to the doubled form of the cosmos.
But the conditions cannot be reversed.
I 62
Archaeologically, macrocosmos and microcosmos seem to be a mere surface effect.
There was a necessity in the center of knowledge.
>
Archeology/Foucault.
It was necessary to adjust the infinite wealth of a similarity introduced between the signs and their meaning as a third, and the monotony which imposed the same division of the similarity as the signifying and the signified.
>
Signs.
Signs themselves only recognize forms of similarity, that means to interpret.
Divination ((s) cognition, guessing the divine will) is not a competition for knowledge but forms a common form with it.
I 64
The magical form of the way of knowledge is inherent.
>
Knowledge.
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II 258ff
Science/Foucault: one does not refer to what has to be experienced, but to what has to be said, so that there can be a discourse.
II 269f
Science history/Foucault:
1. Type: investigates the vocabulary of neighborhoods, dependencies, subordinations. E.g. For them, the Greek method of exhaustion is not a dead end, but an early form of integral calculus.
2. Type: Bachelard, Canguilhem: Models for a history of science as it builds itself against and over a pre-scientific level. Epistemological history of sciences.
>
Canguilhem, >
Bachelard.
3. Type: archaeological history: exposese the discursive practices.
Definition episteme: the totality of relationships that at a given time can unite the discursive practices by which the sciences and formal systems are made possible. No form of knowledge and no type of rationality. It is not about manifestations of the subject, the mind, or a period of time.
The description of the episteme opens up an inexhaustible field and can never be closed.
