Afterword

2020 ◽  
pp. 161-170
Author(s):  
Margaret H. Freeman

Throughout this book, I have attempted to take up Archibald MacLeish’s challenge to show how poets can carry the world in all its complexities into the human mind, in enclosing boundless space in a square foot of paper, and in how deluge can pour from the inch space of the heart. By exploring the workings of the cognitive sciences in approaches to poetry and reevaluating the nature of aesthetics as basic to both the sciences and the arts, I hope to have shown how a poem may create an icon of felt reality. Answers to MacLeish’s questions lie in recognition of a world that, in its never-ending changes and transformations, provides ever new horizons for seekers of knowledge and wisdom. Art in all its forms takes a necessary place along with the sciences in the human expressions of aesthetic cognition by iconically understanding the being of an infinitely changing reality.

2019 ◽  
Vol 141 (9) ◽  
Author(s):  
Shu Chien

Professor Y. C. Fung has made superb contributions to science, engineering, and humanity through his research and its applications, as well as his words and deeds. By setting the highest standards of rigor and excellence, training many outstanding students and their students, and providing his exemplary leadership, Dr. Fung has made tremendous impacts that spread across the world and transcend time. He established the foundations of biomechanics in a variety of living tissues, including the lung, the heart, blood vessels, blood cells, ureter, intestine, skin, as well as other organs and tissues. Through his vision of the power of “making models” to explain and predict biological phenomena, Dr. Fung opened up new horizons for bioengineering, from organs/systems to molecules/genes. He has initiated and fostered the research activities in many institutions in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world. He has made outstanding contributions to education in bioengineering, as well as service to the professional organizations and translation to industry and clinical medicine. He is widely recognized as the Father of Biomechanics and the leading Bioengineer in the world. His extraordinary accomplishments and commands in science, engineering, and the arts make him a Renaissance Man whom the world is most fortunate to have.


2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 386-389
Author(s):  
Eduardo Oliveira

Evinç Doğan (2016). Image of Istanbul, Impact of ECoC 2010 on The City Image. London: Transnational Press London. [222 pp, RRP: £18.75, ISBN: 978-1-910781-22-7]The idea of discovering or creating a form of uniqueness to differentiate a place from others is clearly attractive. In this regard, and in line with Ashworth (2009), three urban planning instruments are widely used throughout the world as a means of boosting a city’s image: (i) personality association - where places associate themselves with a named individual from history, literature, the arts, politics, entertainment, sport or even mythology; (ii) the visual qualities of buildings and urban design, which include flagship building, signature urban design and even signature districts and (iii) event hallmarking - where places organize events, usually cultural (e.g., European Capital of Culture, henceforth referred to as ECoC) or sporting (e.g., the Olympic Games), in order to obtain worldwide recognition. 


Author(s):  
Peter Hoar

Kia ora and welcome to the second issue of BackStory. The members of the Backstory Editorial Team were gratified by the encouraging response to the first issue of the journal. We hope that our currentreaders enjoy our new issue and that it will bring others to share our interest in and enjoyment of the surprisingly varied backstories of New Zealand’s art, media, and design history. This issue takes in a wide variety of topics. Imogen Van Pierce explores the controversy around the Hundertwasser Art Centre and Wairau Māori Art Gallery to be developed in Whangarei. This project has generated debate about the role of the arts and civic architecture at both the local and national levels. This is about how much New Zealanders are prepared to invest in the arts. The value of the artist in New Zealand is also examined by Mark Stocker in his article about the sculptor Margaret Butler and the local reception of her work during the late 1930s. The cultural cringe has a long genealogy. New Zealand has been photographed since the 1840s. Alan Cocker analyses the many roles that photography played in the development of local tourism during the nineteenth century. These images challenged notions of the ‘real’ and the ‘artificial’ and how new technologies mediated the world of lived experience. Recorded sound was another such technology that changed how humans experienced the world. The rise of recorded sound from the 1890s affected lives in many ways and Lewis Tennant’s contribution captures a significant tipping point in this medium’s history in New Zealand as the transition from analogue to digital sound transformed social, commercial and acoustic worlds. The New Zealand Woman’s Weekly celebrates its 85th anniversary this year but when it was launched in 1932 it seemed tohave very little chance of success. Its rival, the Mirror, had dominated the local market since its launch in 1922. Gavin Ellis investigates the Depression-era context of the Woman’s Weekly and how its founders identified a gap in the market that the Mirror was failing to fill. The work of the photographer Marti Friedlander (1908-2016) is familiar to most New Zealanders. Friedlander’s 50 year career and huge range of subjects defy easy summary. She captured New Zealanders, their lives, and their surroundings across all social and cultural borders. In the journal’s profile commentary Linda Yang celebrates Freidlander’s remarkable life and work. Linda also discusses some recent images by Friedlander and connects these with themes present in the photographer’s work from the 1960s and 1970s. The Backstory editors hope that our readers enjoy this stimulating and varied collection of work that illuminate some not so well known aspects of New Zealand’s art, media, and design history. There are many such stories yet to be told and we look forward to bringing them to you.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-130
Author(s):  
Alexander Lukankin ◽  

The post-socialist transformation of general and vocational education system has led to the loss of many positive gains that were already achieved earlier. The polytechnic character of our school and its practice-oriented foundations, based on a reasonable combination of basic education and professional and applied training, were seriously undermined. Modern Russian secondary schools have become something like pre-revolutionary classical high schools, without taking into account the significant fact that in pre-Soviet Russia, along with high schools, there was a wide network of real schools. They focused students on further mastering technical professions and active participation in the production sector of the country. Today we are witnessing a global revolution in the spiritual sphere, aimed at changing the very essence of a man. Note that natural science education is valuable not only for its formal method, but also for providing the basis for a correct understanding of the world. It fosters independence of thought and distrust of other people’s words and authorities. This is the best protection of the human mind from all sorts of superstitions delusions and mysticism.


Author(s):  
Joseph Moreno

While much of contemporary psychotherapy practice often focuses primarily on verbal exchange between therapists and clients, it is important to recognize that verbal expression is just one mode of expression, and not necessarily the deepest or most profound. Many clients in therapy may be more comfortable in expressing themselves in other ways through the modes of music, art, dance and psychodrama. The sources of the arts in healing extend back for many thousands of years and their modern expression through the creative arts therapies are now widely utilized in the mainstream of modern psychotherapy. Traditional healing practices are still widely practiced in many indigenous cultures around the world today and an appreciation of these practices can deeply enrich our understanding of the essential role of the arts in human expression. The aim of this paper is to consider the roots of the arts therapies and really all of psychotherapy, going as far back as pre-historic evidence, followed by an overview of living indigenous healing practices in such settings as Bushman culture in Namibia, Native American Indian culture, as well as in Kenya, Bali, Malaysia, Mongolia and more.


Author(s):  
Roy Livermore

Despite the dumbing-down of education in recent years, it would be unusual to find a ten-year-old who could not name the major continents on a map of the world. Yet how many adults have the faintest idea of the structures that exist within the Earth? Understandably, knowledge is limited by the fact that the Earth’s interior is less accessible than the surface of Pluto, mapped in 2016 by the NASA New Horizons spacecraft. Indeed, Pluto, 7.5 billion kilometres from Earth, was discovered six years earlier than the similar-sized inner core of our planet. Fortunately, modern seismic techniques enable us to image the mantle right down to the core, while laboratory experiments simulating the pressures and temperatures at great depth, combined with computer modelling of mantle convection, help identify its mineral and chemical composition. The results are providing the most rapid advances in our understanding of how this planet works since the great revolution of the 1960s.


Author(s):  
Barry Stroud

This chapter presents a straightforward structural description of Immanuel Kant’s conception of what the transcendental deduction is supposed to do, and how it is supposed to do it. The ‘deduction’ Kant thinks is needed for understanding the human mind would establish and explain our ‘right’ or ‘entitlement’ to something we seem to possess and employ in ‘the highly complicated web of human knowledge’. This is: experience, concepts, and principles. The chapter explains the point and strategy of the ‘deduction’ as Kant understands it, as well as the demanding conditions of its success, without entering into complexities of interpretation or critical assessment of the degree of success actually achieved. It also analyses Kant’s arguments regarding a priori concepts as well as a posteriori knowledge of the world around us, along with his claim that our position in the world must be understood as ‘empirical realism’.


2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 477-480
Author(s):  
Angela Martins ◽  
Vicensia Shule

Africa as a continent has been hit by the coronavirus – the COVID-19 pandemic – as have many parts of the world. Many African Union (AU) member states were badly hit by the virus, while others were only mildly impacted. The arts, culture, and heritage sectors have been severely hit by the pandemic. Fortunately, in many countries in Africa, arts, culture, and heritage were placed at the heart of strategic priorities at the national, regional, and continental levels of combating COVID-19.


2021 ◽  
pp. 204382062098639
Author(s):  
Aya Nassar

In this engagement with Eric Magrane’s article, ‘Climate Geopolitics (The Earth is a Composted Poem)’, I follow two provocations: first, geopoetics as travelling through disciplinary turfs, and second, geopoetics as storytelling. Coming from a disciplinary trajectory that spent a long stop at international relations (IR), these provocations attach me to geopoetics as practice and a growing field. My engagement here is oriented to geopoetics not only at the threshold of geography and the arts and humanities, but also the intersections of geography and politics. I primarily propose that viewing geopoetics as an open space for experimenting allows for disrupting masterful understandings of the academic self and counters a univocal, universal narrative of the world.


Human Affairs ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Roman Madzia

AbstractThe paper proposes an outline of a reconciliatory approach to the perennial controversy between epistemological realism and anti-realism (constructionism). My main conceptual source in explaining this view is the philosophy of pragmatism, more specifically, the epistemological theories of George H. Mead, John Dewey, and also William James’ radical empiricism. First, the paper analyzes the pragmatic treatment of the goal-directedness of action, especially with regard to Mead’s notion of attitudes, and relates it to certain contemporary epistemological theories provided by the cognitive sciences (Maturana, Rizzolatti, Clark). Against this background, the paper presents a philosophical as well as empirical justification of why we should interpret the environment and its objects in terms of possibilities for action. In Mead’s view, the objects and events of our world emerge within stable patterns of organism-environment interactions, which he called “perspectives”. According to pragmatism as well as the aforementioned cognitive scientists, perception and other cognitive processes include not only neural processes in our heads but also the world itself. Elaborating on Mead’s concept of perspectives, the paper argues in favor of the epistemological position called “constructive realism.”


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document