We hope to return to the fundamental material nature of what we do… Architecture is essentially all the immaterial processes of society solidified in physical form. BJARKE INGELS, Materialist Manifesto for Domus 2025 Introduction Different interpretations are possible after the quotation above, made by the talented Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, on the occasion of the presentation of his ‘materialist manifesto’,…
Take a mountain: is it a thing or a place? It is an elemental thing-place. The mountain looms before us as a massive place for things and as itself a thing. It looms as a Thing of things, just as stones and lichen on stones are in turn things of this Thing. Furthermore, just as such determinate things as rocks…
In the introductory note to PART IV – PROLEGOMENA TO A NEW CONCEPT OF NATURE of his 1972 book, The Nature of Physical Existence, the American author and philosopher Ivor Leclerc, explains why he undertook an in-depth exploration of the concept of nature – or the physical existent (from the Greek term ‘physis’, φύσις) –, examining it from historical, linguistic,…
I argue we cannot understand the meaning of the concepts of place and space, and their impact on our understanding of the nature of reality, without considering the meaning of other basic concepts that are co-implicated with and necessary for understanding the very concepts of place and space. That was particularly evident ever since I introduced Julian Barbour’s scientific history…
In October 1933 the British philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead delivered two lectures at the University of Chicago, which were published as ‘Nature and Life’, the following year.[1] The content of those two lectures, now in the public domain, is available on the Internet Archive. What follows is the integral transcription of the second lecture. Whitehead’s arguments, in this…