Michel Foucault (1926–1984) is a major French philosopher and cultural scientist who had a huge influence on modern epistemology and a cultural historian. "The Archeology of Knowledge" completes the so-called. "archaeological period" in the scientist's work ("The Birth of the Clinic: Archeology of the Medical View", 1963; "Words and Things: Archeology of the Humanities", 1966; Russian translation - M., 1977, St. Petersburg, 1994) and formulates the principles " archeology of knowledge" as a special discipline that studies the history of ideas, sciences and mentalities, identifying interactions between various types of speech practices recorded in various kinds of historical documents, as well as between speech practices and extra-linguistic "structures of everyday life" - economic, social, political, etc. .