Spinoza and architectural thinking |
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Authors: | Beth Lord |
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Affiliation: | 1. School of Divinity, History and Philosophy, University of Aberdeen, UKs.b.lord@abdn.ac.ukhttps://orcid.org/0000-0001-9068-0887 |
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Abstract: | ABSTRACTAlthough Spinoza makes few remarks about architecture, his use of architectural examples, understood in the context of his metaphysics and theory of knowledge, reveal the architect to be a distinctive kind of human thinker. In this paper I explore the kind of thinking the architect does, first by demonstrating that Spinoza distinguishes the architect's adequate way of conceiving a building from inadequate ways of imagining one, and second by considering how Spinoza might have understood the architect to translate that adequate thinking into the practice of building and construction. I argue that for Spinoza, the architect integrates imaginative, rational, and intuitive thinking, and the parallel forms of bodily action, to understand and construct a building in its causal connections to its component materials, environment, and users. To understand the true idea of a building is therefore to understand its embeddedness in the world and its functional place in a network of modal relations. |
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Keywords: | Spinoza architecture building art adequate idea inadequate idea imagination temple |
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