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…
By the term ‘spatiophilia’, I present the result of the photographic survey I have been conducting for a couple of years now on how people perceive and use the concepts of space and place with communicative intent in the streets of Milano, Italy. The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. MICHEL FOUCAULT, Of Other Spaces…
These considerations arose from a recent conversation I had with a colleague architect about the reception of the concept of space in architecture before the modern epoch. I hope they can help avoid possible misinterpretations where, in a previous article — Concepts of Space in Vitruvius —, I discussed the possibility of interpreting space (spatium) in a three-dimensional sense in…