John Hendrix

Unconscious Thought in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis explores concepts throughout the history of philosophy that suggest the possibility of unconscious thought and lay the foundation for ideas of unconscious thought in modern philosophy and psychoanalysis. The book considers the workings of unconscious thought, and the role that unconscious thought plays in thinking, language, perception, and human identity. The focus is on the metaphysical and philosophical concepts of unconscious thought, as opposed to the empirical or scientific phenomenon of 'the unconscious', and it is argued that these metaphysical concepts still played an important role in the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. With chapters drawing on a wide range of philosophers from Plotinus to Freud and Lacan, Unconscious Thought in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis casts an original and thought-provoking perspective on the relation between unconscious thought and conscious thought, different kinds of thinking, and the relation between thinking and perceiving.

Continuing the themes that have been addressed in The Humanities in Architectural Design and The Cultural Role of Architecture, this book illustrates the important role that a contradiction between form and function plays in compositional strategies in architecture. The contradiction between form and function is seen as a device for poetic expression, for the expression of ideas, in architecture. Here the role of the terms "form" and "function" are analyzed throughout the history of architecture and architectural theory, from Vitruvius to the present, with particular emphasis on twentieth-century functionalism. Historical examples are given from Ancient, Classical, Islamic, Christian, Byzantine, Gothic, Renaissance, Mannerist, and Neoclassical architecture, and from movements in the twentieth century to the present. In addition philosophical issues such as lineamenti, Vorstellung, différance, dream construction, deep structure and surface structure, topology theory, self-generation, and immanence are explored in relation to the compositions and writings of architects throughout history.
This book contributes to the project of re-establishing architecture as a humanistic discipline, to re-establish an emphasis on the expression of ideas, and on the ethical role of architecture to engage the intellect of the observer and to represent human identity.

Exploring the ambiguities of how we define the word 'culture' in our global society, this book identifies its imprint on architectural ideas. It examines the historical role of the cultural in architectural production and expression, looking at meaning and communication, tracing the formations of cultural identities. Chapters written by international academics in history, theory and philosophy of architecture, examine how different modes of representation throughout history have drawn profound meanings from cultural practices and beliefs. These are as diverse as the designs they inspire and include religious, mythic, poetic, political, and philosophical references.

The volume addresses questions about how processes of vision, perception, and sensation are conceived in the Renaissance, and how these conceptions are made manifest in the arts. The essays provide a fresh perspective on the intellectual confluence between art, science, philosophy, and literature across Renaissance Europe.

Architecture as Cosmology examines the precedents, interpretations, and influences of the architecture of one of the great buildings in the history of architecture, Lincoln Cathedral. It analyzes the origin and development of its architectural forms, which were to a great extent unprecedented and were very influential in the development of English Gothic architecture and in conceptions of architecture to the present day. Architecture as Cosmology emphasizes the relation of the architectural forms to medieval philosophy, focusing on the writings of Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln (1235-53). The architecture is seen as a text of the philosophy, cosmology, and theology of medieval English culture. This book should be useful to anyone interested in architecture, architectural history, architectural theory, Gothic architecture, and medieval philosophy.

The book focuses on two important areas in the philosophy of Robert Grosseteste at the beginning of the thirteenth century: Philosophy of Intellect and Philosophy of Vision. These two areas of Grosseteste's philosophy have not been thoroughly explored, nor their importance established. Robert Grosseteste was the first chancellor of Oxford University and Bishop of Lincoln 1235-53. This project aims to contribute to the importance of Robert Grosseteste in the history of philosophy, and to establish groundwork for further development in these two areas of philosophy, to contribute to contemporary philosophy. Emphasis is placed in the project on the relation between Grosseteste's philosophies and previous philosophical influences (classical, Greek commentators on Aristotle, Arabic commentators on Aristotle, Neoplatonic), as well as their relation to subsequent philosophies in the middle ages, and the Renaissance to the twentieth century. The philosophies are also considered in relation to the architecture of Lincoln Cathedral.

The book analyzes the relation between psychoanalytic theory and compositional strategies in architecture, focusing on the architecture of Peter Eisenman and the writings of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. The book discusses theories of the structure of the psyche, linguistics, perception, and dream construction. The writings of Ferdinand de Saussure and Jacques Derrida, and the architecture of Leon Battista Alberti, Francesco Borromini, Giuseppe Terragni, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe are also explored.

The book examines the aesthetics of Plotinus, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. It discusses the Platonic bases of the aesthetics of Plotinus and the Plotinian bases of the aesthetics of Schelling and Hegel in the philosophy of spirit, identity philosophy, and trancendental idealism. Examining the notion of art as philosophy, as a product of mind, and as an instrument of intellect in the relation between reason and perception, the book involves concepts of the universal and particular, freedom and necessity, the beautiful and sublime, allegory and symbolism, consciousness and self-consciousness, subjective and objective spirit, and forms of artistic represenation.

The book examines the philosophies of Plato in their structural, spatial, and architectonic implications. Plato's philosophies are seen in relation to other philosophies, including those of Anaximander, Plotinus, Proclus, Nicolas Cusanus, Marsilio Ficino, Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida. Plato's philosophies are seen in relation to architectonic conceptions in the arts, including the work of Leon Battista Alberti and Piero della Francesca in the Renaissance, Paul Cezanne, and the Cubists and Deconstructivists in the twentieth century. The book presents new interpretations of philosophical texts, artistic treatises, and works of art and architecture in Western culture as they are interrelated and related to Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophical structures. the book demonstrates the importance of philosophy in the production of the visual arts throughout history and the importance of the relation between the work of art and the philosophical text and artistic treatise.

Edited papers from a conference in the Palazzo Rucellai in Florence in 2003. Explores the idea of a Neoplatonic aesthetic, a philosophy of the arts based on the writings of Plato and the Neoplatonists, including Plotinus, Proclus, Pseudo-Dionysius, Nicolas Cusanus, and Marsilio Ficino, and more contemporary philosophers such as Stephen MacKenna, Iris Murdoch, Denman Ross, Jacques Derrida, and Hans Georg Gadamer. The artistic production of figures such as Gioseffe Zarlino, Fra Angelico, Leon Battista Alberti, Sandro Botticelli, Michelangelo, and Giorgio Vasari is examined.

The book examines architectural and architectonic forms as products of philosophical and epistemological structures in selected cultures and time periods, and analyzes architecture as a text of its culture. Relations between architectural forms and philosophical structures are explored in Western civilization, beginning in Egypt and Greece and culminating in twentieth-century Europe and America. Architecture, like all forms of artistic expression, is interwoven with the beliefs and the structures of knowledge of its culture.

The book analyzes and interprets the architecture of Francesco Borromini, revealing previously unknown intentions and keys to the architectural forms and the knowledge of the culture of seventeenth-century Rome. The book illustrates the potential relation between an architecture and its culture, as they are linked together by philosophical and epistemological structures. There are discussions of Leon Battista Alberti, the Accademia di San Luca, Athanasius Kircher, and Neoplatonic and Hermetic philosophies of the Counter Reformation.

Edited papers from a conference in Rome in 2000, exploring the role that Neoplatonic philosophies have played in painting, sculpture, architecture, literature, and poetry. Subjects include Dante, Alessandro Botticelli, Georgius Gemistos-Plethon, Marsilio Ficino, Florentine tondi, Michelangelo, Giorgio Vasari, El Greco, Athanasius Kircher, Francesco Borromini, Martin Heidegger, and contemporary Italian painting.

A survey of the highlights of Italian history and culture, including art, architecture, philosophy, literature, politics, travel, and contemporary life. Subjects include Cicero, Seneca, Plotinus, Saint Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Saint Francis of Assisi, the Platonic Academy, Lorenzo Valla, Tommaso Campanella, Giordano Bruno, Galileo, Giambattista Vico, Giuseppe Mazzini, Primo Levi, Antonio Gramsci, Benedetto Croce, Umberto Eco, and Silvio Berlusconi.

The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate the role of philosophical idealism in Lacanian psychoanalysis, and the role that both play in thinking about architecture. As the perceived object is seen as a construction of the symbol in the conceptual function, the world as it is perceived is seen as being constructed by the human mind, a viewpoint generally referred to as idealism and associated with George Berkeley, Immanuel Kant, George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Ernst Cassirer.

This essay examines the role that Neoplatonic philosophy played in the artistic theory of the Accademia di San Luca in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Rome, and the subsequent influence on art and architecture. Keywords: Neoplatonism, Accademia di San Luca, Rome, disegno, Federico Zuccari, Plato (Republic), Aristotle (Metaphysics), Plotinus (Enneads), Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologica), Marsilio Ficino (De amore, Theologia Platonica), Pietro da Cortona (Santi Luca e Martina), Carlo Maderno (St. Peter’s), Francesco Borromini (San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane), Giulio Romano (Palazzo del Te), Michelangelo (Porta Pia), Florence, Platonic Academy, Gian Paolo Lomazzo, disegno interno, disegno esterno, concinnitas

The contradiction between form and function should be seen as an important element in architecture. Modernist functionalism prioritized the necessity that form is seen as a consequence of function, adapting Louis Sullivan’s credo that “form follows function,” although Sullivan was not talking about the functional requirements of a building in relation to its form - he was talking about relationships in nature and the creative process. Nevertheless, architecture needs to be understood beyond the formula of “form follows function.” This is not to deny the importance of functionalism in architecture, or to deny that there is a necessary relation between form and function in architecture, but only to reveal that the contradiction between form and function also plays an important role in architecture.

The organization of Lincoln Cathedral reinforces the hierarchical organization of a just society based on Christian morality. All of the details of the architecture reinforce the intellectual comprehension of the just or the good on the part of the worshipper. The details are designed to facilitate the ascension of the mind of the visitor from the physical world to a metaphysical reality that reinforces justice. Bringing together leading scholars in the fields of criminology, international law, philosophy and architectural history and theory, this book examines the interrelationships between architecture and justice, highlighting the provocative and curiously ambiguous juncture between the two. Illustrated by a range of disparate and diverse case studies, it draws out the formal language of justice, and extends the effects that architecture has on both the place of, and the individuals subject to, justice. With its multi-disciplinary perspective, the study serves as a platform on wh...

This essay focuses on the treatises of Marsilio Ficino and Leon Battista Alberti in the Florentine Renaissance, how the ideas in the treatises were applied to artistic production, and how the ideas were developed from classical philosophy. Keywords: Renaissance, perception, Plato, Euclid, Plotinus (Enneads), Marsilio Ficino (De amore), Leon Battista Alberti (De pictura, De re aedificatoria), Piero della Francesca (De prospectiva pingendi), George Berkeley, Immanuel Kant, Alessandro Botticelli (Birth of Venus), Leonardo da Vinci (Last Supper), perspectival construction Keywords:

A study of Jacques Lacan's theory of the Symbolic.

The principal categories of Lacanian psychoanalysis in the structuring of the psyche are the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. The imaginary (imaginaire) refers to perceived or imagined images in conscious and unconscious thought, sensible and intelligible forms; picture thinking (Vorstellung), dream images or manifest content, and conscious ego in discursive thought. The symbolic (symbolique) refers to the signifying order, signifiers, in language, which determine the subject; it refers to the unconscious, and the intellectual, the logos endiathetos and the logos prophorikos. It is the relation between the imaginary and symbolic in conscious and unconscious thought which is the core of Lacanian psychoanalysis. The real (réel) is that which is neither imaginary nor symbolic in conscious or unconscious thought, and which is inaccessible to psychoanalysis. It is only proposed as an algebraic concept, as it can not even be conceived, like the One of Plotinus, which cannot be thought or described, but which exists as an absence in the symbolic order (language) in the same way that the unconscious exists as an absence in conscious thought. The real is as the umbilical cord of the Freudian unconscious, which Lacan reframes as constituted by the symbolic. The imaginary and the symbolic, perception and language, are always interwoven, but while they are always interwoven, the experience of the mirror stage also constitutes a fundamental disjunction between the two, which can never be overcome, and which causes a disjunction or gap within the subject, as it is constituted by the image and the word. At about eighteen months of age, after the initial acquisition of language, the infant first recognizes itself in the mirror in self-consciousness, thus distinguishing itself from its surroundings. From the mirror stage, all perception is subsumed in language, as the imaginary is subsumed in the symbolic, and it is the perceived image which becomes the basis of conscious thought and ego, while language structures the unconscious, in the Lacanian scheme. The ego is formed in the imaginary image of the self in the mirror stage prior to the development of the subject in relation to the Other, which is defined by Lacan as the network of identifications which determine the subject in interpersonal relations, and which constitutes the unconscious. The image of the self formed by the mirror must be reconciled with the image of the self formed in relation to language and other people, which is an impossible reconciliation, and stages a dialectical process, related to the Hegelian dialectic between subjective and objective spirit, or reason and perception, but without resolution. Following the mirror stage, perception,

A study of theories of perception in the Renaissance, ranging from Marsilio Ficino and Leon Battista Alberti to Athanasius Kircher.

The relation between the sensible form and the intelligible form in perception and intellection is described as a form of love in the De amore of Marsilio Ficino in the Renaissance. For Ficino, sensible objects have no connection with each other, or with the perceiver. Without the ordering process of intellection in perception, the sensible world would not exist. Desire for God, or harmonious order in the world, is a desire for human reason in relation to the sensible world. In the first speech in De amore, made by Giovanni Calvalcanti, a friend of Ficino's, to explain the speech made by Phaedrus in the Symposium of Plato, "turned toward God" (II.2), 1 the intellectual in the soul, nous poietikos, "is illuminated by His ray," and the appetite or desire of the intellectual is increased by the splendor of the ray. As the intellectual reaches toward God or cosmic intellect in its desire, "it receives form. For god, who is omnipotent, imprints on the Mind, reaching out towards Him, the nature of all things which are to be created." In perception, the mind creates the form of all things perceived, as the intelligible form, prior to the actual perception, prior to the making of the imprint of the sensible object in the eye, the sensible form. In the De amore, everything which is perceived is painted on the angelic mind, from which are created the forms of all sensible objects, like the archetypal forms which are created by the children of the demiurge of Plato. The forms of things are conceived in the celestial mind, and are called the ideas, as they are in the Timaeus. Without the ordering of the sensible world by reason in perception, the world would only appear as disconnected chaos. Such perception is a function of the desire created in mind by reason. The first turning of the essence of mind to God from chaos is the birth of love, the infusion of the illuminating ray of God is the nourishment of love, and the forming of the ideas is the perfection of love. The forms and ideas of the intellect form a mundus or cosmos, which is the ornament, and the grace of the ornament is beauty. That which is most beautiful in the sensible world is that which most conforms to the forms and ideas in intellect, or the soul for Grosseteste, as the form and idea interact with the imprint of the sensible object in perception, as the soul connects the sensible form and the intelligible form. Love attracts the mind to the beautiful, and allows the mind to become beautiful, as it becomes more aware of the divine idea. The beauty of the ideas in the mind corresponds to the beauty of sensible objects, because it is the ideas in the mind which form sensible objects. Thus "the mind is turned toward God in the same way that the eye is directed toward the light of the sun," in which it perceives the colors and shapes of things,

Paper presented at the Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Conference, Fordham University, New York, 2014.

In Aristotle’s De anima 3.5, the relation between intellect and thought, and between thought and object, is not accessible to discursive or conscious thought; an understanding of the relation requires nous, intuitive or “unconscious” thought. The “active” intellect is accessible to discursive reason only sporadically. “Mind does not think intermittently” (De anima 430a10–25): mind is always thinking, consciously and unconsciously. Alexander of Aphrodisias saw the active intellect as transcendent in relation to the material intellect. The thought which is an object of thought is immaterial, or unconscious. In his De intellectu (108), there must be something at work in thought for which “what it is to be intellect does not lie in its being thought by us,” that is, unconscious. In the De anima of Themistius, mind as passive, in its material potentiality, is destructible and subject to time, but mind as active is free from its material conditions. Discursive thinking is equivalent to thinking in time; time is not present in the same way in unconscious thought or dreams. In the De intellectu of Alfarabi, when intellect “thinks that existent thing which is an intellect in actuality, it does not think an existing thing outside of itself but it only thinks itself,” in unconscious thought. Intellect as the object of its own thought is inaccessible to conscious reason. Intellect ascends from material to agent intellect and we ascend “from that which is best known to us to that which is unknown,” in the unconscious. The knowledge of things which are most accessible to intellect is the lowest form of knowledge; in order to develop, intellect must come to grasp the knowledge which is least accessible and most unconscious. In the Liber Naturalis of Avicenna, intellect is seen as a palimpsest of traces of forms and thoughts of varying clarity in relation to cognition, conscious thought. Unconscious thought is seen as the intelligible in cognition in the Aristotelian model, only accessible to conscious thought or actual intellect to varying degrees. The active intellect of Averroes can be seen as a form of unconscious thought. In his Long Commentary on the De anima, the activity of the active intellect makes images intelligible in unconscious thought, according to Franz Brentano.

Paper presented at the International Society for Neoplatonic Studies Conference, University of Lisbon, 2014.

Plotinus is sometimes referred to as “the first philosopher of the unconscious.” In his 1960 essay “Consciousness and Unconsciousness in Plotinus,” Hans Rudolph Schwyzer called Plotinus “the discoverer of the unconscious.” What exactly was Plotinus’ unconscious? In the Enneads, Plotinus asks about soul and intellect: “Why then…do we not consciously grasp them…? For not everything which is in the soul is immediately perceptible” (V.1.12.1–15).  In the De anima of Aristotle, “Mind does not think intermittently” (430a10–25).  We cannot remember eternal mind in us, because passive mind is perishable. Is the productive or active intelligence in our mind that of which we are not conscious? Can productive intelligence be compared to unconscious thought? Plotinus suggests that we do not notice the activity of intellect because it is not engaged with objects of sense perception. The intellect must involve an activity prior to awareness. Awareness of intellectual activity only occurs when thinking is reflected as in a mirror, but knowledge in discursive reason, reason transitioning from one object to the next in a temporal sequence, is not self-knowledge. Only in the activity of intellect inaccessible to discursive reason is thinking as the equivalent of being. The intellectual act in mind is only apprehended when it is brought into the image-making power of mind through the logos or linguistic articulation; “we are always intellectually active but do not always apprehend our activity” (IV.3.30.1–17). If the Intellectual is the unconscious, then unconscious reason is superior to conscious reason. The inability of conscious reason to know itself in the illusion of self-consciousness is the premise of psychoanalysis in the twentieth century.

Presented at the Renaissance Society of America Conference, Humboldt University, Berlin, 2015.

Mannerist architects in the Cinquecento created what can be called “tropic architecture.” They set out to break the rules of classical architecture, but the rule-breaking was done systematically, by applying rhetorical tropes, or figures of speech, to architectural composition, the four most common being metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. According to Paul Oskar Kristeller, rhetoric was an important basis of Renaissance humanism. Students learned tropes and other figures of speech from well-circulated classical texts such as the Rhetorica ad Herennium and Quintilian’s Institutio oratorio. Examples of tropic devices can be found in works such as Giulio Romano’s Palazzo del Te and Michelangelo’s Porta Pia. There are many examples of mannerist works of architecture in the twentieth century that used the same tropic devices. The use of tropic devices in architectural composition results in an architecture that is a form of poetry.

In the thought of Plotinus, the imagination is responsible for the apprehension of the activity of Intellect. If creativity in the arts involves an exercise of the imagination, the image-making power that links sense perception to noetic thought and the nous poietikos, the poetic or creative intellect, then the arts exercise the apprehension of intellectual activity. According to John Dillon in “Plotinus and the Transcendental Imagination,” Plotinus’ conception of the imagination led to the formulation of the imagination as a basis of artistic creativity. In Plotinus, imagination operates on several different levels: it produces images in sense perception, it synthesizes images in dianoetic thought, and it produces images in correspondence with the articulation through logos of noetic thought. The imagination is what connects the intelligible in intellect and the form in sense perception. Plotinus imagines an art which is a product of noetic thought as made possible by the imagination. The primary principle of beauty is Intellect, from which all images should be taken, as facilitated by imagination. Forms of art, like the forms of nature, are the product of Intellect. The production of a work of art is an intellectual or spiritual exercise of the imagination that allows apprehension of Intellect and noesis in nous poietikos. All art is metaphysical, and is an expression of intelligible form in imagination, an expression of an intellectual idea that can be differentiated from sensible form in intellectual apprehension. There are many ways in which the tenets of the thought of Plotinus become currents of art and aesthetic theory as it develops to the present day.

Presented at the International Society for Neoplatonic Studies Conference, Cardiff, 2013.

A letter written by Robert Grosseteste, the first chancellor of Oxford University and later Bishop of Lincoln from 1235 to 1253, illustrates the role that Neoplatonism played in the creative process of the architect in the Middle Ages. The letter was written from Oxford in around 1200, to Master Adam Rufus, a former student. According to Grosseteste, “It is said that the design is the model to which the craftsman looks to make his handiwork, in imitation of it and in its likeness.” Grosseteste’s letter exhibits a familiarity with the Enneads of Plotinus, which Grosseteste probably was not able to read directly but would have known through texts such as the Theology of Aristotle. In Enneads V.8.1, Plotinus compares two blocks of stone, one of which is carved into a statue by a craftsman, so that in which “the form is not in the material; it is in the designer before ever it enters into the stone…”, the forma artificii of Grosseteste.
      Grosseteste uses the analogy of architecture: “So imagine in the artist’s mind the design of the work to be made, as in the mind of the architect the design and likeness of the house to be built; to this pattern and model he looks only that he may make the house in imitation of it.” The material of the building is organized in imitation of the idea in the mind of the architect; like the forms of nature in relation to the archetypes of the Platonic demiurge, the building is a shadow or reflection of the architectural idea. In the Enneads I.6.3, Plotinus asked, “On what principle does the architect, when he finds the house standing before him correspondent with his inner ideal of a house, pronounce it beautiful?”
      In his cosmologies De Luce (or On Light, 1225–1228) and De lineis, angulis et figuris (or On lines, angles and figures, 1228–1233), written at Oxford, Robert Grosseteste would describe natural bodies as being formed by mathematical and geometrical entities created from light, as reflected from the lux spiritualis, the incorporeal, spiritual light; and in the Commentary on the Posterior Analytics (1228–1235) and the Hexaemeron (c. 1237), Grosseteste would describe the ascension of the soul from the material intellect to the agent intellect, in the apprehension of the divine intellect, intelligentia. These concepts show the influence of Plato and Plotinus and explain in part the intentions of the medieval architect.

Presented at the University of Vienna, Conference on Iconology, 2011.

A core idea in the architectural theory of Leon Battista Alberti, as expressed in the De re aedificatoria, is the distinction between “lineament,” the line in the mind of the architect, and “matter,” the material presence of the building. This distinction plays a key role in architectural design throughout the history of Western architecture. As Le Corbusier would say in the twentieth century, “architecture is a product of the mind.” The distinction between mind and matter can be found in Vitruvius, in the distinction between “that which signifies and that which is signified”; at the Accademia di San Luca in Rome, between disegno interno and disegno esterno; or in Peter Eisenman’s distinction between deep aspect and surface aspect in architecture, to name just three examples. There are passages in the De amore of Marsilio Ficino where it seems clear that he is referring to his mentor’s concept of lineament. Lines cannot be called bodies, for example, and beauty can only be a property of matter through arrangement, proportion, and aspect (shape and color), which are products of thought, in the Neoplatonic tradition, as in the idea of beauty described by Plotinus, which can be found in Alberti’s concept of beauty or concinnitas. Plotinus distinguished the shape of the matter of a statue from the shape of the statue in the mind of the artist. I would like to suggest that Alberti knew the Enneads of Plotinus, perhaps as a result of a meeting with Gemistos Plethon and Nicholas of Cusa at the Academy of Palestrina, and through the translation of the Enneads by Marius Victorinus. Alberti’s concept of lineament is a Neoplatonic concept, and it plays an important role in architectural theory. Neoplatonism can also be found in Alberti’s proportioning systems in his architecture, as Ficino called Alberti a “Platonic mathematician.” These propositions have never been advanced, that I know of, and they are fundamental to an understanding of architectural theory.

Platonic and Neoplatonic concepts can be seen to be interwoven with the basic Aristotelian model of intellect which Avicenna develops in his Liber Naturalis and Metaphysica. Influential Plotinian conceptions include reason principle and intellectual principle, the ascent to intellection through dialectic, the differentiation of intelligibles in the imaginative faculty, the sensible form as representation, and the source of the intelligible form exterior to intellect.

Themistius departs from the Aristotelian tradition and divides thinking into imagination and judgment. Imagination is a faculty for discernment in which an image is formed. Imagination is distinguished from sense perception; the relation between imagination and sense perception is the same as the relation between sense perception and the object of sense perception.

The paper examines the conceptions of intellect and vision as developed by Alexander of Aphrodisias from the De anima of Aristotle. There are three intellects: material (potential), in habitus, and productive, which is "intelligible in act." Intellectual activity is necessary to give form to memory traces in the imaginative faculty (phantasia).

In the essay "Landscapes of Change: Boccioni's Stati d'animo as a General Theory of Models," in Assemblage 19, 1992, Sanford Kwinter proposed a number of theoretical models which could be applied to computer-generated forms in Bioconstructivism. These included topological theory, epigenesis, the epigenetic landscape, morphogenesis, catastrophe and catastrophe theory. Topological theory entails transformational events or deformations in nature which introduce discontinuities into the evolution of a system. Epigenesis entails the generation of smooth landscapes, in waves or the surface of the earth, for example, formed by complex underlying topological interactions. Morphogenesis describes the structural changes occuring during the development of an organism, wherein forms are seen as discontinuities in a system, as moments of structural instability rather than stability. A catastrophe is a morphogenesis, a jump in a system resulting in a discontinuity. Catastrophe theory is a topological theory describing the discontinuities in the evolution in a system in nature. A project which applies these models, and which helps to establish a theoretical basis for Bioconstructivism by applying topological models, is a design for a theater by Amy Lewis in a Graduate Architecture Design Studio directed by Associate Professor Andrew Thurlow at Roger Williams University, in Spring 2011. In the project, moments of structural stability are juxtaposed with moments of structural instability, to represent the contradiction inherent in self-generation or immanence. The singularity of the surfaces of the forms in the epigenetic landscape contradicts the complex network of interactions of topological forces from which they result. Actions in the environment on unstable, unstructured forms, and undifferentiated structures, result in stable, structured forms, and differentiated structures.

In the Long Commentary on the De Anima, Averroes posits three separate intelligences in the anima rationalis or the rational soul: agent intellect or intellectus agens; material or passible intellect, intellectus possibilis; and speculative intellect, intellectus speculativus, or actualized or acquired intellect, intellectus adeptus. In the De Anima 3.1.5, "there are three parts of the intellect in the soul; the first is the receptive intellect, the second, the active intellect, and the third is actual intellection...," that is, material, agent, and speculative or actualized. While material intellect is "partly generable and corruptible, partly eternal," corporeal and incorporeal, the speculative and agent intellects are purely eternal and incorporeal. In the De Anima 3.1.5, the existence of intelligibles or first principles in intellect, as they are understood in actualized intellect, "does not simply result from the reception of the object," the sensible form in sense perception in material intellect, "but consists in attention to, or perception of, the represented forms...,"the cognition of the forms in actualized intellect wherein they can be understood as intelligibles, which requires both the participation of active intellect and the motivation of the individual for intellectual development. The goal of intellectual development is to achieve union with active intellect, the final entelechy, and through this union the highest bliss in life can be achieved. Such bliss can only be achieved "in the eve of life." All individual material intellects are capable of some ability to form concepts and abstract ideas at a basic level, but beyond that intellectual development varies among individuals according to the level of volition. Complete knowledge of the material world results in complete unity between the material intellect and the active intellect.

Though Averroes is not generally considered to be sympathetic to Neoplatonic thinking, there are definite parallels between the philosophies of intellect of Averroes and Plotinus. Both can be considered to be "Idealists" in that intelligible form precedes sensible form in perception, and that the material intellect of Averroes or Reason Principle of Plotinus, nous hylikos or pathetikos, depends in its functioning on the agent intellect of Averroes or Intellectual Principle of Plotinus, nous poietikos. The formation of the image in the oculus mentis is coincident with the formation of a thought, and the sensible form is a transient residue of the permanent intelligible form, as if it is reflected in a mirror and projected on a surface. For both philosophers, material intellect and intellect not connected to sense perception are mediated by a kind of intellectus in habitu, a practicing intellect which leads the individual to higher forms of understanding. The development of phantasmata or imprints of foms in the oculus mentis in the imagination or phantasia is the product of a dialectical relation between the mechanisms of sense perception in material intellect and an a priori understanding of forms in the intelligible, prior to the sensible. In order to be perceived, forms must be constructed, in a structuring of reality.

Leon Battista Alberti and Marsilio Ficino, though separated by twenty-nine years in age, had a close relationship as mentor and pupil. Concepts which can be found in Alberti's De Pictura (1435) and De Re Aedificatoria (1450) are infused in Ficino's De Amore (1469). The concepts include Alberti's theories of armonia, lineamenti, concinnitas, ornamento, and the pyramid of light in the theory of vision. In both Alberti and Ficino, harmonies shared by the body and music are manifestations of the harmonies of the soul. Beauty in body and matter is determined by beauty in mind (mens), that part of mind directed toward intellectus divinus, and beauty is made manifest in mind by the lineamenti, the lines in the mind which are distinguished from matter. Beauty is the internal perfection of the intellectus divinus, which is the good, which is a perfect harmony called concinnitas. Ornament is not beauty, but rather a physical complement to beauty.

Many of the Vaults in English Gothic cathedrals and churches are catechisms of cosmologies and celestial vaults. The tierceron and lierne ribs at Lincoln Cathedral, for example, and later lierne and net vaults at Bristol Cathedral and St. Mary Redcliffe, for example, display the geometries that can be found in medieval cosmologies such as the De Luce and De Lineis, Angulis et Figuris of Robert Grosseteste in the thirteenth century. The vaults can be read as intelligible structures of matter and the heavenly bodies. The vaulting of the nave of Lincoln Cathedral between 1235 and 1245, during the bishopric of Grosseteste, introduces basic vocabulary elements continued in later vaulting, and can be seen as a catechism of Grosseteste's cosmologies. The lierne vault of the choir of Bristol Cathedral, built between 1300 and 1330, has a structural organic quality. The nave vault, completed to its medieval design in the nineteenth century, is a Lincoln-style tierceron vault. The transept vaulting, from between 1460 and 1480, presents an intelligible geometrical structure intended as a cosmology. The vault of the North Porch of St. Mary Redcliffe, from 1325, has a crystalline organic form. The Curvilinear vaulting in the transepts, from the early fourteenth century, presents a cosmology of Euclidean geometries. The nave vault, from between 1337 and 1342, suggests organic topographical lines and vectors of forces in nature and heavenly bodies, simulating the celestial vault. The choir vault, from around 1450, revives the Euclidean geometries of classical cosmologies, in particular the Timaeus of Plato.

The quality of palimpsest in the sketchbook can represent the relation between the human mind, thought and psyche, and the architectural design. Palimpsest can be found in buildings, the urban landscape, and the human mind itself, in the traces of the subconscious which compose conscious thought and imagination.

Architecture, as a form of communication with a vocabulary of forms, can be seen to be an important expression of the ideas, values, and beliefs of a culture, dependent to a large extent on the function of language in the collective unconscious.

The Transcendental Aesthetic is the first part of the Critique of Pure Reason. The A version was written in Königsberg in 1781; the revised version or B version was written in 1787. The transcendental aesthetic is defined as the “science of all principles of a priori sensibility” (A21/B35).  Aesthetic is defined as the science of the doctrine of sensibility. Transcendental is defined as the manner of knowing objects a priori (A11–12/B25), that is, not of empirical origin (A56/B80–81). This should be see as the basis of experience (A783/B811), but is independent of all experience (B2–3). The a priori is universal and necessary, and includes all elements of thought that do not derive from sensations (B1). A priori elements are the product of cognitive faculties, and are invariant features of cognition. While matter or morphe is given a posteriori in sensation, form or eidos exists a priori in the mind, separate from sensation. Form was described by Kant as arising “according as the various things which affect the senses are coordinated by a certain natural law of the mind.”

In his essay “The Unconscious” in 1915, Sigmund Freud defined metapsychology as the description of a mental process. Freud introduced two metapsychologies. The first, described as topographic, defined mental processes in a triadic landscape of unconscious, preconscious, and conscious. The second, described as structural, defined mental processes in a triadic architecture of das Es or the It, das Ich or the I, and das Uber-Ich, or the over-I. English translators gave these categories the names id, ego and super-ego. The It is the other, what is alien in the psyche. For my purposes here I will focus on the topographical metapsychology, and the definition of the unconscious. The Freudian unconscious should not be seen as “merely the seat of instincts”  in the words of Jacques Lacan, Freud’s most important follower. Freud considered The Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1900, to be his most important contribution to psychoanalysis. Freud rejected philosophy as a basis for understanding the human mind, and insisted that psychoanalysis is a science. The fact is that psychoanalysis is based on metapsychology, which is a metaphysical philosophy.

Desire for Lacan, as it is manifest in the mechanisms of language, is the attempt to attain or understand that which is missing from the being of the subject, which is the objet a. The objet a is that around which desire circulates, that upon which fantasy is constructed, and that which is the product of méconnaissance. It is that which is excluded by signification in language, that of which the subject is deprived as it is solidified into a signifier in language. The elided subject in signification, and the divided subject in language, are the result of that which the subject can no longer be in rational discourse, in the Symbolic and the Other. The objet a is present in "the existence of everything that the ego neglects, scotomizes, misconstrues in the sensations that make it react to reality, everything that it ignores, exhausts, and binds in the significations that it receives from language," as Lacan describes in "Aggressivity and Psychoanalysis" (Écrits, A Selection, p. 22). 1 It is the residue of the illusion of consciousness, the mirage of objectification in the perception-consciousness system as conceived by Freud. It is that which cannot be represented by the signifier, those causes and forces which determine the subject, in the unconscious, to which the subject has no access. The objet a represents the inability of the subject to know itself in thought or in consciousness. The Lacanian subject can only say to itself "'either I do not think, or I am not'. There where I think, I don't recognize myself; there where I am not, is the unconscious; there where I am, it is only too clear that I stray from myself" (Hamlet, p. 92). 2 The objet a is thus the absent presence of the subject, the object of the subject's desire, which becomes the other, in Imaginary ego object identification and reflection. The desire of the Other of Lacan, the desire of the subject in language, is transferred to the desire of the other; the other is objectified by the subject to compensate for its lack, the objet a. The objet a is the residue of the dialectic between the Imaginary and the Symbolic, the conflict between the identity of the subject as it is defined by its Imaginary ego in object identification and

The buildings that people build can represent the psyche of human beings. A crack in the orthographic whole of the psyche can be a reaction to the intolerability of the condition of human society, resulting in neurosis, paranoia, wish-fulfillment, fantasy, sublimation, and a splitting of the psyche in its formation in language, science and technology, the unconscious, in the demands of society. According to Sigmund Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents, a source of human suffering is "the inadequacy of our methods of regulating human relations in the family, the community, and the state" (19). The human being "becomes neurotic because they cannot tolerate the degree of privation that society imposes on them in virtue of its cultural ideal" (20). It is certain that "our present-day civilization does not inspire in us a feeling of well-being" (21), and "when the most extreme forms of suffering have to be endured, special mental protective devices come into operation" (22), fantasy, wish-fulfillment, sublimation. Thus "each one of us behaves in some respect like the paranoic, substituting a wish-fulfillment for some aspect of the world which is unbearable to him, and carrying this through into reality" (15). The superstructure of language, rules, codes, science and technology in society forms the unconscious of the individual, according to Lacan, as the Other, but entails a necessary alienation from conscious thought. According to Freud, "From pathology we have come to know a large number of states in which the boundary line between ego and outer world become uncertain, or in which they are actually incorrectly perceived-cases in which parts of a man's own body, even component parts of his own mind, perceptions, thoughts, feelings, appear to him alien and not belonging to himself. … So the ego's cognizance of itself is subject to disturbance, and the boundaries between it and the outer world are not immovable" (3). According to Lacan, language is the source of méconnaissance, in the community of symbols into which the subject is inserted. In its participation in the Other, the ego misrecognizes its own unconscious, but it is the unconscious which constitutes the ego, the Imaginary function. The subject is excentric to the ego, to its own mechanisms of thinking, and does not know what it is. It is impossible for the subject to know itself, given the dichotomy of the Imaginary and Symbolic, conscious ego and unconscious, orthopedic body image and language. The knowledge on the part of the subject of its unconscious is replaced by the illusions of consciousness, the mirage of the cogito, the thinking subject. The subject decenters itself in its commitment to language; science and technology are manifestations of the mechanisms of language, symbolic structures, into which the subject inserts itself, and through which the subject loses itself. Language itself is as a machine in that it detaches itself from the subject, and objectifies the subject in its detachment. In language, in its objectification, the subject is fragmented and disconnected, but the ego of the subject retains the virtual and alienated unity given by the gestalt image of the ideal ego in the mirror stage. The subject is divided in language, and further divided by the relation between language and the object, between the Other and the other object or person.