I argue in this essay that there can be harm due to philosophy that is not directly expressed in violent imagery. The harm is instead a concealed and delayed detrimental effect of an assumption of non-violence in a working model, defined as a picture of a field of enquiry and the methods required to approach it. Theses for the extended mind, as developed by Andy Clark and others, lead to a form of harm that follows from the models they work (...) with. These engineering, tool and function-based models seek smooth interactions and transparency. Following points made by Kim Sterelny in the philosophy of biology, I argue that claims for smoothness and transparency conceal underlying conflict in the situations they seek to describe and explain. This concealment leads to harm, defined as a diminishing of our capacities to flourish in a given environment. (shrink)

Roman writing of the late Republic and early Empire, especially historiography, is filled with exempla, stories of the past meant to serve as models for contemporary and future behavior. This period also witnessed the rise of an encyclopedic mode of composition among Latin authors, which purported to collect and organize the totality of knowledge in a given field. The following essay proposes that exemplarity and encyclopedism were not just literary devices, but deep organizational principles throughout Roman culture. It seeks to (...) show how they were operative in the visual arts in the first century BCE, focusing especially on a frieze depicting the baking process on the tomb of Marcus Vergilius Eurysaces in Rome. By approaching a monument like the frieze of Eurysaces through such principles we may better articulate both visual and thematic relationships across a variety of genres within the broader Roman image world. (shrink)

Claude Perrault, a founding member of the Académie des sciences and architect of the Louvre, is a figure emblematic of architecture’s transformation by the so-called scientific revolution, representing a radical break with tradition. This article will address Perrault’s scientific challenge to architecture as one that harks back to both ancient and modern sources. It explores some ways in which Perrault integrated the analogy between medicine and architecture into his approach to this art and assimilated medical concepts, particularly observation, into an (...) empirical medical approach. This notion of observation was at the heart of the practical aspect of ancient philosophy as a care of the soul which articulated the ancient comparison of the charismatic orator to a doctor. Thus, Perrault’s remarks on Vitruvius’s authority can be broadened beyond architecture to the quest for a guide to living, transcending disciplinary boundaries between natural science and art. Further, Perrault’s claims for naturalness in observation share a double perspective: observation as a new form of learned experience reflects the ethos of the scientist, while, as a traditional activity of peasants, it reflects a raw empirical knowledge about rules of life condensed into habit and custom, enabling common people to be the physicians of themselves. (shrink)

Static levitation is a form of marvel with metaphysical implications whose long history has not previously been charted. First, Pliny the Elder reports an architect’s plan to suspend an iron statue using magnetism, and the later compiler Ampelius mentions a similar-sounding wonder in Syria. When the Serapeum at Alexandria was destroyed, and for many centuries afterwards, chroniclers wrote that an iron Helios had hung magnetically inside. In the Middle Ages, reports of such false miracles multiplied, appearing in Muslim accounts of (...) Christian and Hindu idolatry, as well as Christian descriptions of the tomb of Muhammad. A Christian levitation miracle involving saints’ relics also emerged. Yet magnetic suspension could be represented as miraculous in itself, representing lost higher knowledge, as in the latest and easternmost tradition concerning Konark’s ruined temple. The levitating monument, first found in classical antiquity, has undergone many cultural and epistemological changes in its long and varied history. (shrink)

In Stieglerian fashion, this paper is concerned with both the loss and the re-creation of knowledge in the field of architecture. The student of architecture must be the one who learns new tools and new forms of knowledge and this has profound implications and applicability for the philosophy of education as it is a question of the recuperation of architecture with negentropic tools. Why? In the realm of the digital, it is the case that architectural student is at risk of (...) dis-individuation, the loss of knowledge of such. Therefore, the paper concerns itself with questions of maturity, critical intelligence, trans-individuation, the crisis of noetic being, the artisanal mode of learning and finally the proletarianization of the faculties. It is concerned with the reclamation of noetic space and the search for negentropic tools. This paper is thus pertinent to the philosophy of education because it pertains to the act of creation, the question of imagination and to the loss of thinking as such. Focusing on the history of architecture it demonstrates the loss of knowledge in the history of architecture and shows this has clear implications for the philosophy of education, which is precisely concerned with the nurturing and maturing of the thinking subject. The crisis in the proletarianization of the faculties in architecture pinpoints the role of the artisan’s mode of learning and its crisis brought by the digitisation of architecture. The conclusion shows that Stiegler’s philosophy of the pharmakon is appropriate to understand this movement as it points to new and embraces new modes of learning in the present. (shrink)