Lines of thought : discourse, architectonics, and the origin of modern philosophy / Claudia Brodsky Lacour.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Brodsky, Claudia, 1955-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Descartes, René, 1596-1650.

Descartes, René.

Architecture and philosophy.

Methodology.

Philosophy, Modern--17th century.

Philosophy, Modern.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (177 p.)

Place of Publication:

Durham, N.C. : Duke University Press, 1996.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Preface: What Is Modern?

Pt. 1. Descartes' "Design" 1. Traite or Discours de la methode. 2. Autobiographical Discourse: "Fable" as "Tableau" 3. The "Discourse" of Thinking: Architectural Design. 4. The Things a Thinking Thing Thinks

Pt. 2. The Discourse of Method. 5. Letters and Lines: Algebra and Geometry in Descartes' Geometrie. 6. Writing and Intuition

Pt. 3. Thinking as Line. 7. The Cogito and Architectural Form. 8. Staircase as Labyrinth: Eudoxe on Method. 9. Postscript: Architectural Theory after Descartes

Epilogue: The Line between Aesthetic and Knowledge.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (pages [151]-160) and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781322091693

1322091692

9780822379225

0822379228

OCLC:

891394960