dc.description.abstract |
What is space? There are two ready answers to this question. One of them is spontaneously plausible. It conceives of space as a self contained entity, infinite or finite, an empty vehicle,· ready and having the capacity to be filled with things. Consciously or not, people derive this notion of space from the world as they see it, and unless they are psychologists, artists, or architects, they are unlikely ever to be confronted with the challenge of questioning it. Plato spoke in the Timaeus of space as "the mother and receptacle of all created and visible and in any way sensible things." He thought of it as ''the universal nature which receives all bodies -that must be always called the same; for while receiving all things she never departs at all from her own nature and never in any way or at any time assumes a form like that of any of the things which enter into her; she is the natural recipient of all impressions, and is stirred and informed by them, and appears different from time to time by reason of them." Space was for Plato a nothingness existing as an entity in the outer world, like the objects it could hold. In the absence of such objects, space would still exist, as an empty, boundless container. |
|