This article is about a distinction we often tend to overlook: the difference between ‘place’ and ‘site’. Even if the two terms are both used to denote a territory or a piece of land, I hold – as others have done before me –[1] there is a reduction of meaning in the passage from ‘place’ to ‘site’: a reduction which…
A few weeks ago, I answered a call launched by the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), in association with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, for one of their programs – the Multidisciplinary Research Project. That project aims to promote ‘new modes for collective research’.[1] This year, the sixth edition of the Research Project had the following theme: In the Hurricane,…
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 [i.e., a compound body], just as stones and lichen on stones are in turn things of this Thing. Furthermore, just as suchdeterminate…
In the introductory note to PART IV – PROLEGOMENA TO A NEW CONCEPT OF NATURE of the book The Nature of Physical Existence (1972), the American author, philosopher Ivor Leclerc, remarks on the reason why he developed such an articulated exploration into the conception of nature, i.e., the physical existent (from the Greek term ‘physis’, φύσις), between historical, linguistic, metaphysical…
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…