Architectonics has a long history in philosophy.  Successive philosophers sought to locate the beginning or foundation of all knowledge.  This was used to organise all the disciplines of knowledge in a system.  This lecture will explore the work of Aristotle and Kant where the foundational and organisational tasks of architectonics are articulated.  We will then introduce the crisis of foundations that altered our understanding of knowledge in the twentieth century.  This crisis undermines architectonic systems, revealing vulerabilities in these supposedly complete structures.  By exploring Diane Morgan’s re-reading of Kant’s architectonic in the light of this crisis we will uncover a new version of architectonics that now emerges.  Deleuze and Guattari also give us a new formulation of architectonics when they put forward the notion of the ‘rhizome’ as a model for all knowledge.  What emerges is a practical, open and interdisciplinary version of architectonics.  Instead of seeking a systematic overview of other disciplines philosophy now engages with the concrete work of different fields and seeks to articulate the principles behind a knowledge which lacks foundations.

Slides: A History of Architectonics pdf Architectonics Handout pdf