The Nature and/or Culture of Architecture
In the Classical era, according to Delaporte and Canguilhem, a knowledge of living beings was prescribed by the practices that sought to care for them. Science, in terms of generally limited speculation, attempted to account for the observations which the garden or plantation, hospital or asylum made obvious through the practice of agricultural or medical arts, while philosophically, nature possessed a fundamental unity which could nonetheless be divided into separate kingdoms, a view that hints of the hierarchic world of the Renaissance. One sees, subsequently, a presupposition regarding the distinctive nature of humans informing subsequent theoretical elaboration. Linnaeus, for instance, was furthering theological debate with the aphorism "minerals grow, plants grow and live, animals grow, live and feel." Humans, as was commonly held, were distinguished from these objects and beings by the faculty of reason. Humans were superior to animals, or so Condillac believed, for they possessed a unique mental capacity that arises solely from an ability to receive, store and utilise sensations. Following Locke, Condillac held that a knowledge of nature, all of the complex ideas of it, consists in generalisation of simple ideas which form the mental images of sense impressions. The arts, a general and somewhat vague category encompassing a range of practices, both manual and aesthetic, were also unique to humans, though were themselves distinct from Reason. Classical thought effectively established a boundary between nature and one's knowledge of it, between the theoretical certainties of logic and mathematics on the one hand, and the artful on the other, between philosophical reflection and technical concerns defined by skill and practice.
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