This is the story of an impossible love between a man and a woman. Confused characters living in a senseless world where love and creativity are irrelevant. This poetic narrative is for all of us.

With vast erudition, Foucault cuts across disciplines and reaches back into seventeenth century to show how classical systems of knowledge, which linked all of nature within a great chain of being and analogies between the stars in the heavens and the features in a human face, gave way to the modern sciences of biology, philology, and political economy. The result is nothing less than an archaeology of the sciences that unearths old patterns of meaning and reveals the shocking arbitrariness of our received truths. In the work that established him as the most important French thinker since Sartre, Michel Foucault offers startling evidence that "man"—man as a subject of scientific knowledge—is at best a recent invention, the result of a fundamental mutation in our culture.

When one defines "order" as a sorting of priorities, it becomes beautifully clear as to what Foucault is doing here. With virtuoso showmanship, he weaves an intensely complex history of thought. He dips into literature, art, economics and even biology in The Order of Things, possibly one of the most significant, yet most overlooked, works of the twentieth century. Eclipsed by his later work on power and discourse, nonetheless it was The Order of Things that established Foucault's reputation as an intellectual giant. Pirouetting around the outer edge of language, Foucault unsettles the surface of literary writing. In describing the limitations of our usual taxonomies, he opens the door onto a whole new system of thought, one ripe with what he calls "exotic charm". Intellectual pyrotechnics from the master of critical thinking, this book is crucial reading for those who wish to gain insight into that odd beast called Postmodernism, and a must for any fan of Foucault.

The Order of Things: The Realism of the Principle of Finality is an exploration of the metaphysical principle, “Every agent acts for an end.” In the first part, Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange sets forth the basics of the Aristotelian metaphysics of teleology, defending its place as a central point of metaphysics. After defending its per se nota character, he summarizes a number of main corollaries to the principle, primarily within the perspective established by traditional Thomistic accounts of metaphysics, doing so in a way that is pedagogically sensitive yet speculatively profound. In the second half of The Order of Things, Garrigou-Lagrange gathers together a number of articles which he had written, each having some connection with themes concerning teleology. Thematically, the texts consider the finality and teleology of the human intellect and will, along with the way that the principle of finality sheds light on certain problems associated with the distinction between faith and reason. Finally, the text ends with an important essay on the principle of the mutual interdependence of causes, causae ad invicem sunt causae, sed in diverso genere.

From the Private First Class who knows his place (above a Private but below a Lance Corporal), to the classification of the natural world (Species, Genus, Family, Order . . .), we introduce hierarchies, pecking orders and ranks to every aspect of our lives, from society and religion to leisure and the law, establishing priorities and bringing order to our world. This miscellany of the various hierarchies that govern our existence ranges from the prosaically earthbound, in the form of roads and freeways, to the esoterically celestial, in the form of angels, seraphim, cherubims, archangels and so on. Who is more senior in a Chinese triad, a White Paper Fan or a Red Pole? What trumps a Straight Flush in poker? How many ranks are there between a Detective and a Colonel in the American police? What's the next step up from the Court of Appeal? What is a Royal Peculiar and where does it stand in the hierarchy of the British church? Which sea states lie between Calm and Phenomenal? In a Roman legion, how many men made up a Cohort and how many Cohorts a Legion? What is the hierarchy in the US government? Knowing where something - or someone - stands in the order of things helps us quite literally to put it into context.

Father James Schall, the well- known author and professor of philosophy at Georgetown University, inquires about the various orders found in the cosmos, the human mind, the human body, the city, and he seeks to reflect upon the unity of these orders.In a world in which the presence of reason and order are denied presumably in the name of science in favor of chance explanations of why things are as they are, it is surprising to find that, in the various realms open to the human intellect, we find a persistent order revealed. At first sight, it may seem that this reality can be explained by chance occurrence, but after a point, there is a growing sense that behind things there is, in fact, an order. This order can be traced in the many areas that are open to the human mind. As Aquinas has noted, the order within the cosmos points to an order outside of it, since the cosmos cannot be the cause of its own internal order. Philosophers have long inquired about the curious fact that the order of things implies not a mere relationship of one thing to another, but a hint that the universe is created with a certain superabundance. Why is the universe, and the things within it, not only ordered but, ordered with a sense of beauty? Not only is there an order in things, but also the human mind seems attuned to this order as something it delights in discovering. This relationship implies that there is some correspondence between mind and reality. What is the relationship between the mind and reality? The Order of Things explores this question. Relying on common sense and the experience available to everyone, Schall concludes that it requires more credulity to disbelieve in order than to experience it. Finally, Schall explores the fundamental cause of order, what it is like? Having looked at the order of the created universe, it is not surprising that the revelation of the Godhead is itself ordered in terms of an inner relationship of Persons.

Nursing practice changed dramatically in the mid-1960s as experiments across the country demonstrated the effectiveness of nurses' expanded diagnostic and decision-making authority. The result was a new breed of nurse, the nurse practitioner. In A New Order of Things, Freund takes readers through that evolution. Beginning with a demonstration project at the University of North Carolina, leading to the emergence of an innovative nurse practitioner training program, the siting of rural clinics with nurse practitioners as the primary providers of health services, a consortium of nurse practitioner training programs spanning the state, and ultimately to a movement: a new order of advanced nursing practice and primary care service delivery. A New Order of Things is unique in that it documents a history with contemporary relevance, a case study illustrating how a major innovation was strategically engineered toward adoption at the organizational, health system, and state levels. Using multiple sources of historical records and 36 hours of interviews with leaders of the N.C. nurse practitioner movement, Freund illustrates how change leaders formed alliances in a politically nuanced process, thought ahead and of the present moment simultaneously, were adept at recognizing subtle clues and nimble enough to take advantage of opportune moments. This story is N.C.'s story, but it is far more than that. It is a story for any health professional striving to make change in health services and move an innovative idea into widespread adoption.

An out of sorts librarian finds support and friendship in the most unlikely place. The Order of Things is a new novel from Lynne Hinton--the national bestselling author of Friendship Cake. Andreas Jay Hackett is a university librarian known for her love of keeping things organized. But one summer, she finds herself falling away from a sense of well being, depressed, "out of order." Her work doesn't give her pleasure, her friends worry about her, and her own voice begins to frighten her. Therapy, pills and doctors visits don't help, so Andreas checks herself into a psychiatric facility. There, she finds herself in a room next door to a prison inmate who has also been hospitalized. As she talks with her new neighbor, Andreas begins to come out of her despair--ultimately finding the healing she needs through a friendship that develops in the darkest of circumstances, and despite boundaries of race, gender, education, and age.

Putting Things In Order Has Never Been Easier For The Young Reader. The Simple Text And Colorful Photos Make This Sometimes Confusing Concept Easy And Fun At The Same Time.