Episteme

[2] In the Protagoras, Plato's Socrates notes that nous and episteme are prerequisites for prudence (phronesis).

Aristotle distinguished between five virtues of thought: technê, epistêmê, phronêsis, sophia, and nous, with techne translating as "craft" or "art" and episteme as "knowledge".

[3] A full account of epistêmê is given in Posterior Analytics, where Aristotle argues that knowledge of necessary, rather than contingent, truths regarding causation is foundational for episteme.

[5]: xxii  He uses the term épistémè (French pronunciation: [epistemɛ]) in his The Order of Things, in a specialized sense to mean the historical, non-temporal, a priori knowledge that grounds truth and discourses, thus representing the condition of their possibility within a particular epoch.

[7] Jean Piaget has compared Foucault's use of épistémè with Thomas Kuhn's notion of a paradigm.