Garden of Stones and aThousand Flowers

Garden of Stones

and

a Thousand Flowers

Why we are here and where we came from ?

Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time

Where are we going ?

What were the philosophers thinking about in the Greek Gardens?

Philosophers are often like little children, who first scribble random lines on a piece of paper with their pencils, and now ask an adult

'What is that?

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Occasions

... the only thing we require to be good philosophers is the faculty of wonder...

WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?

What is the most important thing in life?

Something that everybody needs? Philosophers think so. They believe that man cannot live by bread alone. Of course everyone needs food. And everyone needs love and care. But there is something else—apart from that— which everyone needs, and that is to figure out who we are and why we are here.

The best way of approaching philosophy is to ask a few philosophical questions:

How was the world created? Is there any will or meaning behind what happens? Is there a life after death? How can we answer these questions?

Structure of matter

Structure of matter has been a subject of interest since antiquity (here about 400s BCE) when Democritus named the fundamental elements of matter “atomos” (“invisible”) While his interpretation of atomic properties and structure is more on philosophical side one can see some deep ideas that became scientifically verifiable and formalised only in the last 100 years.

Few decades consisted of efforts of Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Pauli, de Broglie, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, and others in the developing quantum theory, used to construct an accurate description of atoms .

.Helena Lehtinen

Guest Star

A Greek philosopher who lived more than two thousand years ago believed that philosophy had its origin in man’s sense of wonder. Man thought it was so astonishing to be alive that philosophical questions arose of their own accord. It is like watching a magic trick. We cannot understand how it is done.

A lot of people experience the world with the same incredulity as when a magician suddenly pulls a rabbit out of a hat which has just been shown to them empty.

In the case of the rabbit, we know the magician has tricked us. What we would like to know is just how he did it. But when it comes to the world it’s somewhat different.

We know that the world is not all sleight of hand and deception because here we are in it, we are part of it. Actually, we are the white rabbit being pulled out of the hat. The only difference between us and the white rabbit is that the rabbit does not realize it is taking part in a magic trick. Unlike us. We feel we are part of something mysterious and we would like to know how it all works.

P.S. As far as the white rabbit is concerned, it might be better to compare it with the whole universe. We who live here are microscopic insects existing deep down in the rabbit’s fur. But philosophers are always trying to climb up the fine hairs of the fur in order to stare right into the magician’s eyes.

"which came first: the chicken or the egg?"

The dilemma stems from the observation that all chickens hatch from eggs and all chicken eggs are laid by chickens. "Chicken-and-egg" is a metaphoric adjective describing situations where it is not clear which of two events should be considered the cause and which should be considered the effect, to express a scenario of infinite regress, or to express the difficulty of sequencing actions where each seems to depend on others being done first. Plutarch posed the question as a philosophical matter in his essay "The Symposiacs", written in the 1st century C

Suggestions for a spoon

Elina Honkanen

Sophie's World is a 1991 novel by Norwegian writer Jostein Gaarder. It follows Sophie, a teenager, who is introduced to the history of philosophy as she is asked "Who are you?" "Where does this world come from?" in a letter from an unknown philosopher.

The nonfictional content of the book aligns with Bertrand Russell's The History of Western Philosophy

THE GARDEN OF EDEN …

at some point something must have come from nothing …

Сhapter 1

Sophie’s World, Jostien Gaarder

EDEN ring / Vesa Nilsson

Tarja Tuupanen

Tarja Tuupanen

“Everything flows,” said Heraclitus

.Helena Lehtinen

Anna Rikkinen

A Portrait Installation

.Petri Eklöf

Annika Eklöf

.Petri Eklöf

Vesa Nilsson

Stellar rings

Summer ́ by Inni Pärnänen

The flower sculpture of her work is built on a principle that allows it to grow, like a fragment from what may have been a much larger hanging.

It can be related to a type known as millefleurs, meaning a thousand flowers. This was a style in the late 15th, and millefleurs were woven in many different centers and workshops in Northern France and Flanders. They often included small animals and birds among the flowers, in which case the animals might be symbolic. The installation invites visitors to take part in the creation of the Garden of a Thousand Flowers by drawing plants, flowers or the inhabitants of the garden.