James Hillman's approach to architecture and the built environment: some conceptual complications and an attempt to resolve them

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 154-164
Author(s):  
Lucy Huskinson
Keyword(s):  
Built Environment ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
The World ◽  
Anima Mundi ◽  
A Site

This paper examines ambiguities and tensions within James Hillman's ideas about the psychological value of the architecture of the built environment in contrast to that of the natural world. In his published works Hillman often describes the built environment and the natural world as equivalent in value, but on other occasions he celebrates the latter to the detriment of former. These contrasting approaches have significant implications for his celebrated conception of anima mundi, where psyche is found in the ‘outside’ word as much as ‘within’ our individual minds. The decisive question therefore is whether the psyche for Hillman is found as readily within the built environment as it is the natural world. This paper argues that Hillman's overall position does not allow a split between city spaces and the natural world: that the built environment is no less a site for psyche than the natural world. After describing instances of Hillman's apparent denigration of the built environment within his published and unpublished archival material, I outline a resolution to the perceived split by utilising his notions of ‘pathologizing’ and aesthetics. The paper concludes that not all, but most, buildings and urban spaces fail to house psyche in the world. For Hillman, only a built environment that is able to engage our aesthetic sensibilities can succeed in doing so, but the vast majority of urban spaces remain anaesthetised by the ego's preoccupation with all things superficial, pleasurable, pretty, and functional.

scholarly journals The oldest herpetological collection in the world: the surviving amphibian and reptile specimens of the Museum of Ulisse Aldrovandi

2013 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-321 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron M. Bauer ◽  
Alessandro Ceregato ◽  
Massimo Delfino
Keyword(s):  
New World ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Museum Specimens ◽  
Natural Philosopher ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
Natural History Collection ◽  
The World ◽  
Renaissance Italy ◽  
Cabinet Of Curiosities ◽  
Modern Sense

The natural history collection of the Bolognese polymath, encyclopedist, and natural philosopher Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605) is regarded as the first museum in the modern sense of the term. It was intended as a resource for scholarship and a microcosm of the natural world, not simply a cabinet of curiosities. In addition to physical specimens, Aldrovandi’s zoological material included a large series of paintings of animals (Tavole di Animali) that were integral to the collection. Following Aldrovandi’s death, his collection was maintained by the terms of his will, but by the 19th century relatively little remained. We examined surviving herpetological components of the collection, comprising 19 specimens of ten species, as well as the corresponding paintings and associated archival material in the Museum of Palazzo Poggi, Museo di Zoologia, and Biblioteca Universitaria Bolognese in Bologna, Italy. Although the antiquity of some of these dried preparations is in question, many are documented in the Tavole di Animali and/or are mentioned in 17th century lists of the museum, verifying them as the oldest museum specimens of amphibians and reptiles in the world. Exotic species are best represented, including two specimens of Uromastyx aegyptia and several boid snakes – the first New World reptiles to be displayed in Europe. However, the Tavole di Animali suggest that the original collection was dominated by Italian taxa and that greater effort may have been made to conserve the more spectacular specimens. The Aldrovandi collection provides a tangible link to the dawn of modern herpetology in Renaissance Italy.

Movement

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pablo F. Gómez
Keyword(s):  
Rural Areas ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Body ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Rural Settlements ◽  
The World ◽  
Urban Settlements ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Vast Network

Caribbean spaces were nourished physically and culturally by their sea links and a vast network of terrestrial connections uniting small rural settlements and larger urban spaces like Cartagena and Habana. Free blacks and slaves frequently traveled between different caribben locales, and between urban settlements and rural areas in the region, where they had contact with maroon blacks. These elastic, unbounded migrations proved to be journeys of historical consequence. The chapter explores how black ritual practitioners and their cosmopolitan practices of knowledge production about the natural world moved within this vibrant world. It argues that black ritual practitioners’ claims about the world emerged from local particulars that fostered an adaptive praxis predicated on the experiential. Early modern Caribbean epistemologies about the body were shaped not only by ritual specialists, but also by their patients. The chapter shows how this was a population that was highly mobile and exposed to ideas and treatments coming from all over the world. In the Caribbean, this amalgamating culture was driven by the imperatives of creating new healing techniques that could be deployed under myriad biological, political, cultural, and economical circumstances.

A Māori Girl Watches, Listens, and Learns – Coming of Age from an Indigenous Viewpoint: Mauri (Merata Mita, 1988)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alistair Fox
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous People ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
Indigenous Woman ◽  
Spiritual Dimension ◽  
The World ◽  
Life Force ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter examines Merata Mita’s Mauri, the first fiction feature film in the world to be solely written and directed by an indigenous woman, as an example of “Fourth Cinema” – that is, a form of filmmaking that aims to create, produce, and transmit the stories of indigenous people, and in their own image – showing how Mita presents the coming-of-age story of a Māori girl who grows into an understanding of the spiritual dimension of the relationship of her people to the natural world, and to the ancestors who have preceded them. The discussion demonstrates how the film adopts storytelling procedures that reflect a distinctively Māori view of time and are designed to signify the presence of the mauri (or life force) in the Māori world.

Varieties of Understanding

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Cognitive Resources ◽  
The World ◽  
Historical Tradition ◽  
Normative Considerations ◽  
Shed Light

According to a long historical tradition, understanding comes in different varieties. In particular, it is said that understanding people has a different epistemic profile than understanding the natural world—it calls on different cognitive resources, for instance, and brings to bear distinctive normative considerations. Thus in order to understand people we might need to appreciate, or in some way sympathetically reconstruct, the reasons that led a person to act in a certain way. By comparison, when it comes to understanding natural events, like earthquakes or eclipses, no appreciation of reasons or acts of sympathetic reconstruction is arguably needed—mainly because there are no reasons on the scene to even be appreciated, and no perspectives to be sympathetically pieced together. In this volume some of the world’s leading philosophers, psychologists, and theologians shed light on the various ways in which we understand the world, pushing debates on this issue to new levels of sophistication and insight.

Fundamentality

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Healey
Keyword(s):  
Quantum Theory ◽  
High Energy Physics ◽  
Physical Property ◽  
Natural World ◽  
High Energy ◽  
Quantum Field Theories ◽  
Fundamental Physics ◽  
The World ◽  
Energy Physics

The metaphor that fundamental physics is concerned to say what the natural world is like at the deepest level may be cashed out in terms of entities, properties, or laws. The role of quantum field theories in the Standard Model of high-energy physics suggests that fundamental entities, properties, and laws are to be sought in these theories. But the contextual ontology proposed in Chapter 12 would support no unified compositional structure for the world; a quantum state assignment specifies no physical property distribution sufficient even to determine all physical facts; and quantum theory posits no fundamental laws of time evolution, whether deterministic or stochastic. Quantum theory has made a revolutionary contribution to fundamental physics because its principles have permitted tremendous unification of science through the successful application of models constructed in conformity to them: but these models do not say what the world is like at the deepest level.

Beyond Concepts

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Garrett Millikan
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Conceptual Development ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Language Function ◽  
Natural Signs ◽  
Transmission Of Information ◽  
The World ◽  
Natural Information ◽  
Natural Ontology

This book weaves together themes from natural ontology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language and information, areas of inquiry that have not recently been treated together. The sprawling topic is Kant’s how is knowledge possible? but viewed from a contemporary naturalist standpoint. The assumption is that we are evolved creatures that use cognition as a guide in dealing with the natural world, and that the natural world is roughly as natural science has tried to describe it. Very unlike Kant, then, we must begin with ontology, with a rough understanding of what the world is like prior to cognition, only later developing theories about the nature of cognition within that world and how it manages to reflect the rest of nature. And in trying to get from ontology to cognition we must traverse another non-Kantian domain: questions about the transmission of information both through natural signs and through purposeful signs including, especially, language. Novelties are the introduction of unitrackers and unicepts whose job is to recognize the same again as manifested through the jargon of experience, a direct reference theory for common nouns and other extensional terms, a naturalist sketch of uniceptual—roughly conceptual— development, a theory of natural information and of language function that shows how properly functioning language carries natural information, a novel description of the semantics/pragmatics distinction, a discussion of perception as translation from natural informational signs, new descriptions of indexicals and demonstratives and of intensional contexts and a new analysis of the reference of incomplete descriptions.

How is science to be carried forward, and its conclusions reported?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Briggs ◽  
Hans Halvorson ◽  
Andrew Steane
Keyword(s):  
Mathematical Proof ◽  
Good Practice ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Component Part ◽  
Journal Articles ◽  
Scientific Publications ◽  
Direct Role ◽  
Intellectual Activity ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
The World

The chapter appraises science as an intellectual activity that is appropriately carried out on its own terms. Consequently, it is not appropriate to introduce references to God as a component part of a mathematical proof, nor of a system of forces in the natural world, nor of a sequence of impersonal processes in the biosphere. This does not mean that it is inappropriate to be thankful to God and to celebrate all these aspects of the world as gifts. They can be employed as opportunities to express appreciation through studying and understanding them better in their own right. Nevertheless, there may be processes, such as those which shape a person’s self-identity, in which it is appropriate to recognize God’s more direct role. Good practice concerning acknowledgements sections in scientific publications such as doctoral theses and journal articles is then discussed.

Montaigne on Monsters and Monstrosity

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Long
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Knowledge Systems ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
Divine Omnipotence ◽  
Human Creativity ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face

Monsters take on many roles in Montaigne’s Essays, almost always in novel ways. They do not take on their usual roles as markers of other races, genders, or bodies, as threats or objects of repulsion. Rather, the authorial self and his work are seen as monstrous; Europeans and their culture are seen as monstrous; the knowledge systems that create monsters are themselves monstrous; man’s vanity is monstrous. But most of all, the monster is the provocation to meditation on man’s presumption, and on the limitations of human knowledge and power in the face of the world and the divine. As the sign of the diversity and mutability of the natural world and thus of divine omnipotence, the monstrous and unusual is valued by Montaigne over the normal or usual. It is also the mark of human creativity, dependent as it is on the vagaries of the imagination, new and radically different from the rhetorical, literary, and artistic norms. This is why the Essays themselves can be considered a monstrous work.

Playful mobilities in the Global South: A study of Pokémon Go play in Rio de Janeiro and Nairobi

2021 ◽  
pp. 146144482110164
Author(s):  
Adriana de Souza e Silva ◽  
Ragan Glover-Rijkse ◽  
Anne Njathi ◽  
Daniela de Cunto Bueno
Keyword(s):  
South America ◽  
Rio De Janeiro ◽  
Global South ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Urban Mobility ◽  
Ordinary Life ◽  
Perceptions Of Risk ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Pokémon Go

Pokémon Go is the most popular location-based game worldwide. As a location-based game, Pokémon Go’s gameplay is connected to networked urban mobility. However, urban mobility differs significantly around the world. Large metropoles in South America and Africa, for example, experience ingrained social, cultural, and economic inequalities. With this in mind, we interviewed Pokémon Go players in two Global South cities, Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and Nairobi (Kenya), to understand how players navigate urban spaces not only based on gameplay but with broader concerns for safety. Our findings reveal that players negotiate their urban mobilities based on perceptions of risk and safety, choosing how to move around and avoiding areas known for violence and theft. These findings are relevant for understanding the social and political aspects of networked urban spaces as well as for investigating games as venues through which we can understand ordinary life, racial, gender, and socioeconomic inequalities.

scholarly journals Internet of Samples (iSamples): Toward an interdisciplinary cyberinfrastructure for material samples

GigaScience ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil Davies ◽  
John Deck ◽  
Eric C Kansa ◽  
Sarah Whitcher Kansa ◽  
John Kunze ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Best Practices ◽  
Built Environment ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Natural Science ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Data Standards ◽  
Meta Data ◽  
Cross Domain ◽  
Data Stewardship

Abstract Sampling the natural world and built environment underpins much of science, yet systems for managing material samples and associated (meta)data are fragmented across institutional catalogs, practices for identification, and discipline-specific (meta)data standards. The Internet of Samples (iSamples) is a standards-based collaboration to uniquely, consistently, and conveniently identify material samples, record core metadata about them, and link them to other samples, data, and research products. iSamples extends existing resources and best practices in data stewardship to render a cross-domain cyberinfrastructure that enables transdisciplinary research, discovery, and reuse of material samples in 21st century natural science.

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