Abstract

Although the medieval period was not part of Michel Foucault’s seminal study on ‘The Order of Things’, there are good reasons to believe that the learned cultures of the Middle Ages were to a certain degree based on specific epistemic orders, general organizing principles which were unconsciously presupposed in concepts of reality. Nevertheless, the extent as to which these concepts are in fact committed to the assumption of a metaphysically determined measuring of reality, is not altogether clear. This article aims to discuss this question in general, based on recent views of the role of the ‘subject’ in epistemic orders.