Modern cartography, grounded in the Euclidean concept of space and the mathematization of its language, has laid the foundation of academic geography and promoted its epistemic emergence as a scientific discipline. Developments over the last decades and the “spatial turn” in the social sciences have innovated the discipline, opening up a new gap between geography and cartography, which despite its technological apparatus seems regressive and old-fashioned. Their reconciliation calls for a re-thinking of the philosophical basis of cartography, to be achieved by tapping Leibniz and Heidegger’s concepts of space, in order to turn the map into the expression of a dialogical systemism able to represent relationships in social world.
Frédéric Kaplan, Isabella Di Lenardo, Rémi Guillaume Petitpierre