Abstract

Socrates claimed Daedalus, the mythical first architect, as his ancestor. Taking this as a point of departure, the thesis explores the relationship between architecture and speculative thought, and shows how the latter is grounded in the former. A detailed examination of the Anaximander fragment, the earliest surviving record in Western philosophy, is considered in relation to Anaximander's built work. This three-part cosmic model which included a celestial sphere, the first map of the world, and a sun clock, reveals the fragment to be a theory of the work in that the cosmic order Anaximander was the first to articulate was discovered through the building of the model. The model is seen as comparable to a daidalon, a creation of Daedalus, whose legend reflects the importance of craft in the self-consciousness of archaic Greece where the kosmos of civilization were seen as having emerged with the kosmos allowed to appear through the making of the artifact. Archaic self-consciousness is further examined through the emergence of the Greek city-state and in the building of the first peripteral temples, both of which are revealed as necessary antecedents to birth of theory, understood as the wondering admiration of the well-made thing.