Abstract
Although 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.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 489-504 |
Number of pages | 16 |
Journal | Intellectual History Review |
Volume | 30 |
Issue number | 3 |
Early online date | 21 Apr 2020 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2020 |
Keywords
- Spinoza
- architecture
- building
- art
- adequate idea
- inadequate idea
- imagination
- temple