The ultimate concern of The order of things (OT) is the cognitive status of the modern “human sciences” or “sciences of man.” Foucault maintains that, to understand this status, we need to understand the place of these sciences in the overall epistemological field of modern knowledge. This in turn requires a grasp of what knowledge means in modern culture, what forms it takes, and where, among these forms, the human sciences are situated. OT's effort to achieve this understanding is based on several fundamental propositions. The first is that what knowledge means has varied from one historical period to another; specifically, in recent Western culture, the Renaissance (roughly, the sixteenth century), the Classical Age (from the mid-seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth century), and the Modern Age (from the beginning of the nineteenth century to at least the middle of the twentieth) have all had very different conceptions of knowledge. Second, a given epoch's conception of knowledge is ultimately grounded in its “experience of order” — that is, the fundamental way in which it sees things connected to one another. For example, in the Renaissance, things were ordered through resemblance, whereas in the Classical Age order was a matter of relations of strict identity and difference.