Footnotes2Plato

“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”
–Alfred North Whitehead

Tag: Christopher Alexander

  • The Function of Reason and the Recovery of an Earthly Architecture

    The Function of Reason and the Recovery of an Earthly Architecture

    Click here to view this essay at the publisher’s website, FunctionLab. The Function of Reason and the Recovery of an Earthly Architecture By Matthew David Segall, PhD June 2016 “[The] relatedness between us and the world…which begins to exist wherever there is living structure is as important in the sphere of building as it is…

  • Metaphor and the Allure of Objects

    I’ve just finished Harman‘s chapters on Metaphor and Humor in Guerrilla Metaphysics. He explores the meaning-making capacities of language and laughter in the hopes that they might help account for how objects are capable of interaction despite their infinite concealment from one another. Through his explorations into Ortega y Gasset‘s ontology of metaphor and Bergson‘s account…

  • Christopher Alexander’s Science of Imagination

    I’m six chapters into The Luminous Ground, and Christopher Alexander has already convinced me that living architecture has the potential to profoundly alter the way we relate to the universe. A building composed of what Alexander calls “living centers” literally opens a window to a deeper dimension of reality. We do not see these openings…

  • “The Luminous Ground” by Christopher Alexander

    Christopher Alexander is an architect, but in order to build living structures resonant with human feeling, he had also to become a cosmologist. “A person who adheres to classical 19th- or 20th-century beliefs about matter,” writes Alexander, “will not be able, fully, to accept the revisions in building practice that I have proposed, because the…