The title of the research, and consequently the guiding principle behind the design, making is thinking, stemmed from a frustration with the often-held view that the latter is of greater importance than the former. That thinking, as our intellect of the mind, is of a superior motive to the things we do or make with our hands, and this is a condition which belongs to both society and the individual’s psychology. However, I believe this is not the case. I have (...) the view that making is fundamental to our being and complements our thinking as its equal. Part of the research was a search through history, to explore whether this distinction had always been made, and if not, why and how it had happened. The history of our intellectual developments is a long and very rich one, and it is the reason why we practice architecture the way we do today. It is essentially a question of representation: what architecture, and the other things of our making, represent, but also how those things are representative of the tools we use to make them. Yet the idea that the thing in question represents a larger, intellectual or philosophical field might not have always been the case. A contemporary art historian, makes an extraordinary case for an origin of architecture in the Archaic Greek temple which had to first exist before man could have the necessary perception of things to theorise about them. Like Heidegger before her, she reasons that it is in the beautifully made art work, through the human perception of depth, which belongs to all of our senses, that human beings can take the outlook upon themselves. In her argument, making is what allowed man to think. But really, the most fundamental conclusion from the research, and essential to the project, was that things, and architecture most definitely is a thing—philosophically speaking—are defined by the matter from which they are made. Yet this is often a mistrusted truth. Our history has made us doubt this truth. That same history has given us the practice to which we adhere today, but for those of us who believe in the importance of things, and their importance as our frame of reference for a sense of being in the world, or as Heidegger would call it, a sense of dwelling, then how those things are made is an ethical and extremely important question. However, to accept only our origin is to deny the rest of the human condition which belongs to the entirety of human history. Therefore, the scientific and political realm to which architecture now rightfully belongs, through our intellectual developments in representation, cannot be dismissed. Design then is about the mediation between the two—between our poetic, communicative origins, and our intellectual, instrumental present condition. In practice it is about the balance between thinking and making—our heads and our hands. Along side the philosophical undertaking of the research a series of making exercises were undertaken. These four cubes were made with only two rules. Firstly, the shape, the cube. And secondly, the knowledge and potential of the material itself. These cubes were specifically about the making of things bound to their inherent material properties. They were made by the material guiding me, and not the other way around. This is the definition of making, thought of by its philosophical and etymological definition. In Greek poiesis means to make, but furthermore, and as Heidegger defined it, it means to bring something into being that did not exist before. It is the mimesis of nature. And so, the poet takes from the things that surround him and he makes them his own. This is how the architect acts ethically too—by making things appropriate to the place and for the people who they provide space. And this was the very objective of the design thesis, _Moments for Repose; Making Along the Pennine Way_, to explore, through making, how one can act poetically. (shrink)

This paper attempts to clarify Merleau-Ponty’s later work by tracing a hitherto overlooked set of concerns that were of key consequence for the formulation of his ontological research. I argue that his ontology can be understood as a response to a set of problems originating in reflections on the intersubjective use of language in dialogue, undertaken in the early 1950s. His study of dialogue disclosed a structure of meaning-formation and pointed towards a theory of truth (both recurring ontological topics) that (...) post-Phenomenology premises could not account for. A study of dialogue shows that speakers’ positions are interchangeable, that speaking subjects are active and passive in varying degrees, and that the intentional roles of subjects and objects are liable to shift or ‘transgress’ themselves. These observations anticipate the concepts of ‘reversibility’ and ‘narcissism’, his later view of activity and passivity, and his later view of intentionality, and sharpened the need to adopt an intersubjective focus in ontological research. (shrink)

The semantic paradoxes are often associated with self-reference or referential circularity. Yablo (Analysis 53(4):251–252, 1993), however, has shown that there are infinitary versions of the paradoxes that do not involve this form of circularity. It remains an open question what relations of reference between collections of sentences afford the structure necessary for paradoxicality. In this essay, we lay the groundwork for a general investigation into the nature of reference structures that support the semantic paradoxes and the semantic hypodoxes. We develop (...) a functionally complete infinitary propositional language endowed with a denotation assignment and extract the reference structural information in terms of graph-theoretic properties. We introduce the new concepts of dangerous and precarious reference graphs, which allows us to rigorously define the task: classify the dangerous and precarious directed graphs purely in terms of their graph-theoretic properties. Ungroundedness will be shown to fully characterize the precarious reference graphs and fully characterize the dangerous finite graphs. We prove that an undirected graph has a dangerous orientation if and only if it contains a cycle, providing some support for the traditional idea that cyclic structure is required for paradoxicality. This leaves the task of classifying danger for infinite acyclic reference graphs. We provide some compactness results, which give further necessary conditions on danger in infinite graphs, which in conjunction with a notion of self-containment allows us to prove that dangerous acyclic graphs must have infinitely many vertices with infinite out-degree. But a full characterization of danger remains an open question. In the appendices we relate our results to the results given in Cook (J Symb Log 69(3):767–774, 2004) and Yablo (2006) with respect to more restricted sentences systems, which we call $\mathcal{F}$ -systems. (shrink)

This paper compares Peirce’s and Hintikka’s logical philosophies and identifies a cross-section of similarities in their thoughts in the areas of action-first epistemology, pragmaticist meaning, philosophy of science, and philosophy of logic and mathematics.