WIP.
A list built around two topics:
Making things small as part of an imaginative process ("Imaginative miniaturisation").
Interpreting the large in the small (see microcosm-macrocosm analogy).
Random related stuff to go in list and/or to learn to learn more about:
Sciences: Cosmology (origins of the universe in the small), levels of explanation, multiscale modeling, microscopes, model organisms, a bunch of other stuff I've missed?
Art and iconography:
Topic (1) has its roots in Gaston Bachelard and Gilbert Durand. They use concepts like "Lilliputian Reveries" and "Gulliverisation" to highlight that making things small is a part of the imaginative process (not just interpreting the large in the small). Durand also states that (1) often has the following associated imagery:
Symbolic relationships between the miniature and gigantic, especially reversals where the small overcomes the large.
Obsessive details within art forms, e.g. architecture and painting.
Container symbolism and containers-within-containers (see the banner image and the entire alchemical process of making a homunculus). Nested symbolism.
"Cut-Continuity" in Japanese Aesthetics.
Philosophy:
Platonism and Neoplatonism (Allegory, non finito), Pythagoreanism, Stoicism (sympatheia), Chinese Philosophy (Wuxing, the Dao and Wanwu), the Western Esoteric Tradition (Paracelsus and homunculi, Swedenborg's "correspondences," synchronicity and synchromysticism, Coincidentia Oppositorum), German Romanticism (fragments and aphorisms as philosophy vs. systems), Merleau-Ponty (the constellation of concepts involving "ineinander," interwovenness, envelopment, flesh, chiasm, etc.), D&G (molecular-molar, rhizome-tree).
Ontology: Ways/Fragments/Remnants/Shards of Being.
Potential downsides to the concept/analogy/"image of thought": losing sight of the whole, pettiness and small-mindedness, reductionism.
Related lists:
Automata, Robots, and Mechanisms: automata/mechanisms as explanans for larger (and smaller) explanandum.
Maps, Atlases, Cartography: maps as miniature fragments of realities.
Gardens and Gardening: various aspects of gardens/gardening as parts of nature.
Philosophical fragments and aphorisms.
Related lists on lit.salon:
jalousiee's anima mundi list: "A list of books that I feel are either trying to capture the soul of the world or explain why the soul left."
tgestabrook's Tarot books.