If architecture is concerned with order, its omnipresent origins must be told in connection with the history of philosophy. This extraordinary book is more than an imaginative work of scholarship and a philological tour de force; it is essential reading for architects aware for the need to grasp the story of emerging order at the 'end of modernity,' a time mysteriously a/symmetrical with that of Anaximander.
Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Saidye Rosner Bronfman Professor of the History of Architecture, McGill University
McEwen manages, through a learned and indeed dizzying play of tropes and verbal analysis of the relevant Greek terms, to display the processes through which the archaic Greeks, building on mythical figures such as Daedalos, began to think about and organize their cities and temples. It is a virtuoso performance.
George Hersey, Professor, Department of the History of Art, Yale University
Socrates' Ancestor is a gem of brilliant scholarship. All through the work I encountered insights and observations that answer questions I have nurtured for a long time. McEwen's achievement of uniting the rigor of mature and impeccable scholarship with the world of the imagination that is so often sacrificed in our universities make this book into a text which should be read by all students of architecture and architectural history, and students of classical Greece too.
Robert-Jan van Pelt, Associate Professor of Cultural History, School of Architecture, University of Waterloo