scholarly journals Tracing the Landscape: Re-Enchantment, Play, and Spirituality in Parkour

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (9) ◽  
pp. 505
Author(s):  
Brett David Potter
Keyword(s):  
Urban Environment ◽  
Human Body ◽  
The Body ◽  
Religious Language ◽  
Ecological Consciousness ◽  
Traditional Sports ◽  
Urban Topography ◽  
Free Running ◽  
Urban Contexts ◽  
The Mind

Parkour, along with “free-running”, is a relatively new but increasingly ubiquitous sport with possibilities for new configurations of ecology and spirituality in global urban contexts. Parkour differs significantly from traditional sports in its use of existing urban topography including walls, fences, and rooftops as an obstacle course/playground to be creatively navigated. Both parkour and “free-running”, in their haptic, intuitive exploration of the environment retrieve an enchanted notion of place with analogues in the religious language of pilgrimage. The parkour practitioner or traceur/traceuse exemplifies what Michael Atkinson terms “human reclamation”—a reclaiming of the body in space, and of the urban environment itself—which can be seen as a form of playful, creative spirituality based on “aligning the mind, body, and spirit within the environmental spaces at hand”. This study will subsequently examine parkour at the intersection of spirituality, phenomenology, and ecology in three ways: (1) As a returning of sport to a more “enchanted” ecological consciousness through poeisis and touch; (2) a recovery of the lost “play-element” in sport (Huizinga); and (3) a recovery of the human body attuned to our evolutionary past.

scholarly journals James Joyce and the Epiphanic Inscription: Towards an Art of Gesture as Rhythm

Humanities ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 109
Author(s):  
Alberto Tondello
Keyword(s):  
James Joyce ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Mutual Influence ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Shed Light

In Agency and Embodiment, Carrie Noland describes gesture as “a type of inscription, a parsing of the body into signifying and operational units”, considering it as a means to read and decode the human body. Through an analysis of James Joyce’s collection of Epiphanies, my paper will examine how gesture, as a mode of expression of the body, can be transcribed on the written page. Written and collected to record a “spiritual manifestation” shining through “in the vulgarity of speech or gesture, or in a memorable phase of the mind itself”, Joyce’s Epiphanies can be considered as the first step in his sustained attempt to develop an art of gesture-as-rhythm. These short pieces appear as the site in which the author seeks, through the medium of writing, to negotiate and redefine the boundaries of the physical human body. Moving towards a mapping of body and mind through the concept of rhythm, and pointing to a collaboration and mutual influence between interiority and exteriority, the Epiphanies open up a space for the reformulation of the relationship between the human body and its environment. Unpacking the ideas that sit at the heart of the concept of epiphany, the paper will shed light on how this particular mode of writing produces a rhythmic art of gesture, fixing and simultaneously liberating human and nonhuman bodies on the written page.

scholarly journals The Thinking Body: a Study of the Architectural Ramifications of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Rendering of the Human Body's Capacities

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Karan August
Keyword(s):  
Human Body ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
The Body ◽  
Critical Approach ◽  
Spatial Practices ◽  
Sensory Experiences ◽  
Phenomenological Experience ◽  
The World ◽  
The Mind

<p>Phenomenology offers a conceptual framework that connects and strengthens the architect' s intuitive understanding of the human experience of space with the theorist's more critical approach. Phenomenology is an ideal vehicle for architectural theorists to avoid the friction between first-hand or subjective experience and generalised or abstracted accounts of experience. In this thesis I extract an account of the human experience of space that is implicit in the Philosopher Maurice Merleau-Pontys work. I consider how this understanding has been employed in architectural scholarship and practice. In particular, I argue that the human body renders the richness of space through deliberate engagement with the indeterminate and independent possibilities of the world. In other words, as the body intentionally engages with the world, it synthesises objects that create determinate spatial situations. I account for Merleau-Ponty's depiction of the body' s non-rule governed, non-reflective, normative directiveness towards spaces and elements, and label it the thinking body. Furthermore I examine how the philosophical theory of Merleau-Ponty is represented in the explicitly theoretical works of Juhani Pallasmaa. In turn I then consider how the thinking body is physically and conceptually realised in the buildings of Carlo Scarpa. Finally I find that Juhani Pallasmaa's description of the phenomenological experience of space is incompatible with Merleau-Ponty's. The strategic importance of these different accounts emerges when projecting their implications for designed space. Pallasmaa' s account points towards an architecture that prioritises sensory experiences synthesised by the mind. The design focus of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy leads to spatial practices in line with Carlo Scarpa, that are sympathetic to the causal qualities of an intentional bodily engagement with spatial situations. In accord with Merleau-Ponty I argue that human body is our medium for the world and as such creates the spatial situation we engage with from a formless manifold of possibilities.</p>

From Inscribed Bodies to Distributed Persons: Contextualizing Tairona Figural Images in Performance

2003 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew G. Looper
Keyword(s):  
Human Body ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Archaeological Site ◽  
The Body ◽  
Sacred Spaces ◽  
Mind And Body ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Art And Architecture ◽  
Ceremonial Architecture

Following trends in anthropology, the human body has recently become an important topic of discourse in archaeology. While some anthropologists consider the body as a social metaphor or site of symbolic inscription, others have questioned the validity of approaches based on the dichotomization and hierarchization of the mind and body. Semasiology, in particular, offers an epistemologically sound basis for interpreting the body, by grounding agency in the socially-structured actions that constitute corporeal space. This article applies the semasiological concept of the action-sign to archaeological problems through an examination of the interrelationship between Tairona anthropomorphic imagery and remains of ceremonial architecture at Pueblito, an archaeological site in Colombia. In both cases, physical remains constitute the traces of the actions through which agential persons created sacred spaces, and the meanings of these spaces may be more fully reconstructed by comparing diverse modes of embodiment. Tairona figural art and architecture constitute a creative technology, serving as an indexically-bound nexus of embodied social action.

Corporeal Ontology: Beyond Mind-Body Dualism?

Politics ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Jenkins
Keyword(s):  
Political Science ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Human Subject ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Social ◽  
Scientific Status ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Dynamic Interplay

The definition and boundaries of the political have received considerable attention in recent times in political science, perhaps as a result of the wavering confidence in the scientific status of the knowledge that the discipline creates. However, a conspicuous absence continues to haunt mainstream political science, one that if rectified threatens, in some ways, to broaden both the nature of the political still further and to challenge the very division of knowledge into the social and natural sciences. This absence is the human body and this article seeks to ask after its exclusion and to suggest that its exclusion is both political and needs rectifying. I argue that the exclusion of the body in political science is a consequence of an inadequate ontological short cut, which is accepted (mostly) unquestioningly by political analysts and which has severe epistemological and methodological consequences. I suggest that a more reflective consideration of the body and its dynamic interplay with the mind could offer the discipline a greater understanding of the human subject, as well as alter power-knowledge relations.

scholarly journals The Thinking Body: a Study of the Architectural Ramifications of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Rendering of the Human Body's Capacities

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Karan August
Keyword(s):  
Human Body ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
The Body ◽  
Critical Approach ◽  
Spatial Practices ◽  
Sensory Experiences ◽  
Phenomenological Experience ◽  
The World ◽  
The Mind

<p>Phenomenology offers a conceptual framework that connects and strengthens the architect' s intuitive understanding of the human experience of space with the theorist's more critical approach. Phenomenology is an ideal vehicle for architectural theorists to avoid the friction between first-hand or subjective experience and generalised or abstracted accounts of experience. In this thesis I extract an account of the human experience of space that is implicit in the Philosopher Maurice Merleau-Pontys work. I consider how this understanding has been employed in architectural scholarship and practice. In particular, I argue that the human body renders the richness of space through deliberate engagement with the indeterminate and independent possibilities of the world. In other words, as the body intentionally engages with the world, it synthesises objects that create determinate spatial situations. I account for Merleau-Ponty's depiction of the body' s non-rule governed, non-reflective, normative directiveness towards spaces and elements, and label it the thinking body. Furthermore I examine how the philosophical theory of Merleau-Ponty is represented in the explicitly theoretical works of Juhani Pallasmaa. In turn I then consider how the thinking body is physically and conceptually realised in the buildings of Carlo Scarpa. Finally I find that Juhani Pallasmaa's description of the phenomenological experience of space is incompatible with Merleau-Ponty's. The strategic importance of these different accounts emerges when projecting their implications for designed space. Pallasmaa' s account points towards an architecture that prioritises sensory experiences synthesised by the mind. The design focus of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy leads to spatial practices in line with Carlo Scarpa, that are sympathetic to the causal qualities of an intentional bodily engagement with spatial situations. In accord with Merleau-Ponty I argue that human body is our medium for the world and as such creates the spatial situation we engage with from a formless manifold of possibilities.</p>

scholarly journals Angel in “the Cartesian theatre” – Aquinas and the mind-body problem

2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 66-79
Author(s):  
Tomasz Stępień
Keyword(s):  
Human Body ◽  
Body Problem ◽  
Human Action ◽  
The Body ◽  
Explanatory Gap ◽  
Philosophical Discussion ◽  
Body And Soul ◽  
Mind Body Problem ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Explanatory Gap

One of the solutions of the mind-body problem, which returns to the philosophical discussion on consciousness is the “soul hyphotesis”. Existence of the soul can clear the “explanatory gap”, but it brings yet another problems in explanation of how consciousness works. The magiority of those issues exist because of very specific understanding of the mind-body relations in Cartesian way as two separated substances. Some of the schoars propose to overlap the Cartesian approach by returning to the philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas. This article shows that in the writings of Aquinas we can find exact analogy of the Cartesian view of the body-soul relations in the description of how immaterial angel assums the body. For Aquinas angel exist and acts in assumed human body in the very same way as Descartes describes the soul acting in human body, and angel’s mode of perception is similar to what is usually called as “the Cartesian theatre”. For Aquinas angel in assumed body cannot perfom any human action, it only pretends to perform it, because it operates bodily organs as the form, which is not united with this specific body. St Thomas explanation of the relation of body and soul in human being relies on the claim of unity of body and soul, which together are one substance. Such approach was even called biological, because of the stress on the role which body plays in human actions. Therefore Aquinas proposition could be perceived the way of overcoming the dualism and removing some of the dilemas which are linked with “soul hypothesis” understood in traditional way.

scholarly journals Fear is Stress that causes Weakening of the Immune System

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (S4) ◽  
pp. 19-21
Author(s):  
L Ross-Williams Rhoda ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Immune System ◽  
Health Risk ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Modern Medicine ◽  
The Body ◽  
Death Rates ◽  
News Reports ◽  
Body And Soul ◽  
The Mind

The immune system protects the human body from pathogens like viruses and bacteria. People need to maintain a strong immune system during the COVID-19 pandemic. Unfortunately, the fearmongering news reports on death rates increase fear. This could become a health risk because fear could weaken the immune system by in creasing the release of corticosteroid in the body. Modern medicine includes the mind, body, and soul strengthening the immune system.

scholarly journals The Pandemic of the E-Human Movement

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 2
Author(s):  
Julie Rammal
Keyword(s):  
Side Effects ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Human Movement ◽  
The Body ◽  
Live Streaming ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Online Classes ◽  
Personal Training ◽  
Health Clubs ◽  
The Mind

The movement's evolution and change have strikingly shut down gyms, health clubs, fitness classes, live, personal training jobs, and more during the pandemic. The massive shift has opened up live streaming and online classes; however, we may be soon facing a new body and mind pandemic if we are not aware of the side effects. The longer we are away from socializing and being trained with technique and form, the human body will later experience a separation between body, mind, and soul with dormant emotions and feelings. . In fact, the mind and memory may start to decrease, and focus and discipline will fade. Through the Holistic methodology, we can re-ignite the human being and preserve the humans to continue moving, healing, breathing in a language that the body understands.

The body and religious language

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mahdi Esfahani
Keyword(s):  
Direct Effect ◽  
Human Body ◽  
The Body ◽  
Religious Language ◽  
Theological Debate ◽  
The Relationship

In this article, the author discusses the relationship between the human body and the emergence of religious language, starting with the thesis that the nature of the human body has a direct effect on the determination of language, and that we only understand the meaning of words in accordance with our physical disposition. In this thorough philosophical-theological treatise on Being, speech, the body and prophetology, Qur’anic textual examples and Islamic traditions are used to explain how body and language interrelate and what conclusions can be drawn from this for the centuries-old theological debate on the "anthropomorphisms" in the Qur’an.

Spinoza on the Essence of the Human Body and the Part of the Mind That Is Eternal

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Don Garrett
Keyword(s):  
Human Body ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Mind

Spinoza’s central doctrines in Part 5 of the Ethics include the following: (1) there is in God an idea of the formal essence of each human body; (2) because this idea remains after the death of the body, a part of the human mind is eternal; and (3) the wiser and more knowing one is, the greater is this part of one’s mind that is eternal. Each doctrine seems to be inconsistent—indeed, each in two different ways—with the rest of Spinoza’s philosophy. Resolving these apparent inconsistencies requires an understanding of Spinoza’s theory of formal essences and its connection to his theories of intellect and consciousness. This chapter explains, for each doctrine, (i) why it must be attributed to Spinoza; (ii) why it seems difficult to reconcile with the rest of his philosophy; and (iii) how an understanding of his theory of formal essences can resolve the apparent inconsistencies.

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