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,…