Non-Urban Philosophy
One fears, in fact, that our naming practices could easily take on the infinite character of the very series the names are meant to pick out.
.. Thus the contemporary American philosopher of science Michael Friedman, for example, drawing on J. L. Heilbron’s excellent book “The Sun in the Church,” has compellingly argued that we can trace a straight line from the ancient preoccupation with the temporal rhythms of the church calendar, to the construction of medieval cathedrals as dual-purpose astronomical observatories, and on, in a few more interesting steps, to modern European philosophical reflections on the nature of space and time.
.. Socrates would be even more blunt in his characterization of philosophy as by definition an urban activity, and thus an activity more or less removed from the cycles of the seasons and of nature. As he puts it in the dialogue “Phaedrus”: “I am a lover of knowledge, and the men who dwell in the city are my teachers, and not the trees or the country.”
… It excludes the vast cognitive and interpretive resources of peoples who live in closer contact with the forces and cycles of the natural world, whether as foragers or as pastoralists and farmers. And let us make no mistake: these resources are equal to those of the people in the academies praised by Vico. They are the product of exactly the same sort of brains, set into different circumstances, making sense of those circumstances using just the same mixture of practical and theoretical reflection to which the “men who dwell in the city” have access.