Western philosophy | EPFL Graph Search

Western philosophy encompasses the philosophical thought and work of the Western world. Historically, the term refers to the philosophical thinking of Western culture, beginning with the ancient Greek philosophy of the pre-Socratics. The word philosophy itself originated from the Ancient Greek (φιλοσοφία), literally, "the love of wisdom" φιλεῖν , "to love" and σοφία sophía, "wisdom"). History Ancient Ancient Greek philosophyThe scope of ancient Western philosophy included the problems of philosophy as they are understood today; but it also included many other disciplines, such as pure mathematics and natural sciences such as physics, astronomy, and biology (Aristotle, for example, wrote on all of these topics). Pre-Socratics Pre-Socratic philosophyThe pre-Socratic philosophers were interested in cosmology; the nature and origin of the universe, while rejecting mythical answers to such questions. They were specifically interested in the (the caus

Le vide

Stephanie Bender

Today the question of how to work in the continuous contemporary urban landscape, is a big concern for urban development professionals. Still marked by the modern obsession to define the building forms, a vision influenced by the functionalist movement of the Thirties, these same professionals have lost their means of working sustainably in a contemporary city which is both continuous and fragmented, like an individualised collection of various materials and shapes without urban links, spreading out without limits in the overall landscape. In this chaos, an urban approach has appeared, changing the interest from the building to its landscape, from the built to the non-built, and above all from the filled to the void, and offers a new approach more adapted to the context of today's urban environment, capable of creating links with the non built, of offering new urban materials through the 'non urban', and generating public spaces in the presence of 'non-form' buildings. This approach, which here is called The void. New urban strategies, works with the 'non-materials' such as the landscape, the infrastructure or the programmes, and tries to meet the challenge of a new urbanism in the contemporary city. To understand this, the thesis will strive to explore the chronology of this idea through its different chapters. A 'prehistory' will provide an understanding of the origins of this, via its discoverers, pioneers and precursors and will present an astonishing picture of first attempts to define the urban environment via the void. The case of Melun-Senart, the urban strategy developed in 1987 by Rem Koolhaas and his Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), considered as the starting point for this search and as the masterpiece of the Void approach, will demonstrate the extremely innovative phenomena which resulted from what it called by its author as the "Strategy of the void". Putting this into perspective in the work of Rem Koolhaas will reveal a dense web of projects and writings on, or with the void, which again reinforces the idea of its pertinence. The exploration of the artistic fields and parallel philosophies, will demonstrate the pre-existence of the 'void' concepts amongst the protagonists and will prove the huge influence that they had in the construction of this new urban idea for the architects and the urban planners, and in particular Koolhaas. Finally, other contemporary urban protagonists will illustrate through their projects and their writings, a variety of approaches for the void up to the present day. And right at the end, an experiment through the void projects of the author, will offer an introspective vision of the process. More than two decades after the 'Strategy of the void' this approach goes beyond the diagrammatic stage of a competition, confirming not only its pertinence, but also its ability to provide answers that are both varied and renewed to the extremely complex and confused situations that are to be found in today's urban environment. This new way of conceptualising the urban landscape by the void, the reference for the dense area of the historical city, is replaced by the informal void of the contemporary city considered as the very identity of this new continuous urbanism and shows itself ultimately to be the void. a new urban strategy.

EPFL2011

Desargues and Leibniz: In the Black Box - A Mathematical Model of the Leibnizian Monad

Bernard Cache

Here Bernard Cache provides a detailed analysis of a paper written in 1636 by the French mathematician, architect and engineer, Girard Desargues. Desargues is best known as the founder of projective geometry. Cache explains how he initally developed this significant concept in response to the very practical problems of producing a perspectival drawing. The introduction of projective geometry, though, had potentially more far-reaching implications on philosophical thought, informing the theory of monads developed by the German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz in 1714 to explain the metaphysics of simple substances. © 2011 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Wiley-Blackwell2011

Il demone dell'analogia: Ovvero affinità e divergenze fra il compagno aristotele e noi

Nicola Braghieri

This laconic discourse uses the Aristotelian authority to define the role of the analogical procedure in the government of the architectural composition. Respecting its ambiguous balance between mathematical method and attitude of the imagination, analogy is here intended as the relationship between fragments of the structure and the structure in its entirety. Specifically, it is considered as a procedure through which the human being is capable to mutually associate entities of different nature to process and elaborate formal similarities and differences. The philosophical tradition, since beginning of time, introduces this associative model to emancipate the primitive concept of comparison between two entities from a mere “formal similarity between the entities themselves” to a “proportional correspondence between a couple of measures of different entities “. The treatises of Humanism, following the Vitruvian though congenitally permeated by Aristotelian philosophy, introduce in architecture a system of general validity to overcome any particular approach coming from the visual association of apparent or evident forms. ‘Ça va sans dire’ that the analogy permeates every discourse on architecture and, more or less explicitly, guides every project practice from its genesis to its signification. Not accidentally, Vitruvius literally uses the Greek word ‘analogon’, only later translating it into Latin ‘proportio’. As a proportion he means the correspondence between the measures of the different elements that make up a single work. ‘Analogon’ is thus an instrument necessary to mathematically regulate the principles of the design of a building, specifically a temple. Vitruvius therefore intends analogy as a function related to logical-dialectical rather than to the universe of sensory perception. Therefore, he means the analogy in a very different sense and meaning from the intuitive one that will then use the romantic aesthetic and modern philosophy. The analogical procedure for Vitruvius is the “way” through which the elements of the order are regulate, as it was for Aristotle the way to construct the proportional metaphor, considered “the mother of all the rhetorical figures”. In these terms the analogy works as a “proportioning machine” between different entities, but it is not to be considered as an idea of universal metaphysical order. Following this logic construction, it could be said that for Aristotle the human being is an “analog machine”. This machine proceeds by processes of affinity and similarity, sometimes through linguistic metaphors abstracted from the “logic of facts”, to operate according to what is properly defined as “logic of opinion”. The logic of opinion, or even more properly, the “logic of affection”, is constituted through a continuous game of analogies with the “world of the surrounding and memory”, therefore with the objects of the outside reality and their inner representations. The affinities that are established between objects, then between architectures, arise from external, formal relations, subsequently become affective, sympathetic, finally spiritual. It is this aura of spirituality that paradoxically brings them closer to the abstraction of the Euclidean analogy.