#philosophy-of-language

Thomas Hobbes’s 1651 work, Leviathan, was written in Paris, where he had fled the English Civil War because of his royalist leanings. In this work, Hobbes defines Leviathan as a strong state authority. To do so, he is compelled to develop certain definitions concerning human and societal nature. In this week’s Digital Culture Readings class, we focused on the fifth chapter of Leviathan, titled “Of Reason, and Science.” While eagerly awaiting my students’ papers, I present my own response paper…

The mandatory course Readings on Digital Culture in the Graduate Program in Architectural Design at Istanbul Bilgi University began with the introductory chapter of Charlie Gere’s Digital Culture. We will write a response paper every week. I have completed my response to the first reading. The reading begins with the parallel development of the Industrial Revolution and capitalism. It then follows this history up to the emergence of today’s computers. It looks at how money gradually became a more abstract…

Everything starts with an image in the mind, with a cinematic dream: the great white cliffs at the end of the movie, “Atonement”. While the waves are hitting the shore, that reunion that can never happen. But the moment we take our first step, that abstract feeling of Ludwig’s hard reality smacks us: “The world is everything that is the case; it is the totality of facts, not of things.” The exact departure times on the station boards, the numbers…

The question of how form emerges in architecture has always been one of the most fundamental debate topics of computational design. When I was a graduate student, we used to examine how abstract language structures made of words and rules turned into spatial and geometric systems. In this post, starting from the reflection of linguistic theories on architecture, we will talk about the logic of discrete aggregation that we study in the first year Design Computing courses. At the same…

The Hilbert Curve is one of the results of David Hilbert’s vision of mathematics as a network of symbolic systems. Defined in 1891, this curve is a fractal that fills a two-dimensional plane with a one-dimensional line in the limit. It exhibits self-similarity. It emerged from representing higher-dimensional spaces through continuous, lower-dimensional entities. A curve that grows within a bounded area remains continuous but non-differentiable. Yet it possesses infinite length. Perhaps no one will ever truly see or fully grasp…