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)

Examining various aspects of how Kepler’s discovery of retinal images was received in the field of philosophy, this article questions the meaning of the Keplerian dictum “ut pictura, ita visio”. In what sense could we say that vision is just like the physiological picture formed at the back of the eye? We show that with this question arises an opposition between two theoretical options – a tension that is rarely pointed out: The first option views physiological pictures (retinal or cerebral) (...) as the proximal, internal objects of perception, inspected by the soul on the very body of the eye or brain, while the second considers that vision, although indexed on the picture, is never directed upon it, the picture being merely the causal antecedent of an act of direct perception of the external world. (shrink)

We call attention to the historical fact that the meaning of symmetry in antiquity—as it appears in Vitruvius’s De architectura—is entirely different from the modern concept. This leads us to the question, what is the evidence for the changes in the meaning of the term symmetry, and what were the different meanings attached to it? We show that the meaning of the term in an aesthetic sense gradually shifted in the context of architecture before the image of the balance was (...) attached to the term in the middle of the 18th century and well before the first modern scientific usage by Legendre in 1794.Keywords: Symmetry; Vitruvius; Claude Perrault; Charles-Louis de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu; Balance in architecture. (shrink)

Many physicians, anatomists and natural philosophers engaged in attempts to map the seat of the soul during the so-called Scientific Revolution of the European seventeenth century. The history of these efforts needs to be told in light of the puzzlement bred by today's strides in the neurological sciences. The accounts discussed here, most centrally by Nicolaus Steno, Claude Perrault and Thomas Willis, betray the acknowledgement that a gap remained between observable form, on the one hand, and motor and (...) sensory functions, on the other. Observation yielded information about form, but did not guarantee a constant correlation with presumed function, while the mechanisms of sense and movement did not fit in with accounts of action and cognition whose purpose was to place the connection between active body and willful, conscious soul onto a descriptive rather than metaphysical plane. Teleology was now no longer a helpful tool in the disciplines of anatomy and physiology; the consequences of this are still with us. (shrink)

Résumé L’écriture, la peinture et la relation à l’architecture sont les trois points d’entrée de ce rappel de l’œuvre de Claude Rutault, au travers d’une mise en parallèle avec celle de Rémy Zaugg. Sur le mode du témoignage, Xavier Douroux revient sur l’histoire du Consortium et de sa coopération avec Claude Rutault, notamment sur les expériences de peinture « en architecture » à la villa Savoye de Le Corbusier, à l’agence de Dominique Perrault, au pavillon de Mies (...) Van der Rohe, et à l’ Éclat de folie de Bernard Tschumi. (shrink)

Hearing has traditionally been regarded as the second sense--as somehow less rational and less modern than the first sense, sight. Reason and Resonance explodes this myth by reconstructing the process through which the ear came to play a central role in modern culture and rationality. For the past four hundred years, hearing has been understood as involving the sympathetic resonance between the vibrating air and various parts of the inner ear. But the emergence of resonance as the centerpiece of modern (...) aurality also coincides with the triumph of a new type of epistemology in which the absence of resonance is the very condition of thought. Our mind's relationship to the world is said to rest on distance or, as the very synonym for reason suggests, reflection. Reason and Resonance traces the genealogy of this "intimate animosity" between reason and resonance through a series of interrelated case studies involving a varied cast of otologists, philosophers, physiologists, pamphleteers, and music theorists. Among them are the seventeenth-century architect-zoologist Claude Perrault, who refuted Cartesianism in a book on sound and hearing; the Sturm und Drang poet Wilhelm Heinse and his friend the anatomist Samuel Sömmerring, who believed the ventricular fluid to be the interface between the soul and the auditory nerve; the renowned physiologist Johannes Müller, who invented the concept of "sense energies"; and Müller's most important student, Hermann von Helmholtz, author of the magisterial Sensations of Tone. Erlman also discusses key twentieth-century thinkers of aurality, including Ernst Mach; the communications engineer and proponent of the first nonresonant wave theory of hearing, Georg von Békésy; political activist and philosopher Günther Anders; and Martin Heidegger. (shrink)

It is considerably easier to say that modern philosophy began with Descartes than it is to define the modernity and philosophy to which Descartes gave rise. In _Lines of Thought_, Claudia Brodsky Lacour describes the double origin of modern philosophy in Descartes’s _Discours de la méthode_ and _Géométrie_, works whose interrelation, she argues, reveals the specific nature of the modern in his thought. Her study examines the roles of discourse and writing in Cartesian method and intuition, and the significance of (...) graphic architectonic form in the genealogy of modern philosophy. While Cartesianism has long served as a synonym for rationalism, the contents of Descartes’s method and _cogito_ have remained infamously resistant to rational analysis. Similarly, although modern phenomenological analyses descend from Descartes’s notion of intuition, the “things” Cartesian intuitions represent bear no resemblance to phenomena. By returning to what Descartes calls the construction of his “foundation” in the _Discours_, Brodsky Lacour identifies the conceptual problems at the root of Descartes’s literary and aesthetic theory as well as epistemology. If, for Descartes, linear extension and “I” are the only “things” we can know exist, the Cartesian subject of thought, she shows, derives first from the intersection of discourse and drawing, representation and matter. The crux of that intersection, Brodsky Lacour concludes, is and must be the _cogito_, Descartes’s theoretical extension of thinking into material being. Describable in accordance with the _Géométrie_ as a freely constructed line of thought, the _cogito_, she argues, extends historically to link philosophy with theories of discursive representation and graphic delineation after Descartes. In conclusion, Brodsky Lacour analyzes such a link in the writings of Claude Perrault, the architectural theorist whose reflections on beauty helped shape the seventeenth-century dispute between “the ancients and the moderns.” Part of a growing body of literary and interdisciplinary considerations of philosophical texts, _Lines of Thought_ will appeal to theorists and historians of literature, architecture, art, and philosophy, and those concerned with the origin and identity of the modern. (shrink)