Movement, Technology, and Culture in the Making of (Czech) Lives

Traversing ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Susanna Trnka
Keyword(s):  
Life Course ◽  
Martin Heidegger ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Technology And Culture ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World

This chapter outlines the ways of seeing, experiencing, and moving through the world and the kinds of persons people become through them. It explains the process known as traversing, which was drawn from philosophical concepts developed by two phenomenological philosophers, Martin Heidegger and Jan Patocka. With the ethnographic analyses of the lives of contemporary Czechs, the chapter examines how embodiment is crucial for understanding “being-in-the-world.” Specifically, it focuses on three kinds of movements made as embodied actors in the world: how people move through time and space, how people move toward and away from one another, and how people move toward themselves and the earth they live on. It highlights the significance of both spatiality and temporality, considering how movement varies across different moments in the body's temporality or life course.

The Common Fossils of The British Rocks

The Geologist ◽  
1858 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-29
Author(s):  
S. J. Mackie
Keyword(s):  
Past History ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
The Road ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common

In a magazine devoted especially to the propagation of Geological knowledge, it seems no infringement of its space, no deterioration of its value, tha t some pains should be taken to aid the student in his early efforts, and to disperse broadcast some useful elementary information, which may prove to the mass at once a source of instruction and of enjoyment, and so, by clearing the road to future and higher studies, may foster a dawning taste, and ultimately prove the means of adding many volunteers, and not unlikely even some brilliant master-minds to the ranks of Geologists, that otherwise, deterred at the outset, might perhaps have turned their attention and talents to some more accessible, if not more congenial study.Who does not feel some interest in the past history of this beautiful world—the scene of our labours and of our loves—of our successes and of our failures—the stage of our existence and the tomb of our dust ? If the animated creations of the past were dumb brute animals, still the earth was green and gay with trees, and plants and flowers—the hu m of insects vibrated on the summer's air, and the snows of winter covered the ancient lands with their hyemal mantle—the tides of ocean rose and fell, and the world went rolling on through time and space, through years and seasons. There were earthquakes the n and blazing volcanos—and winds and storms—great waves and merry dancing ripples on the sea.

Traversing

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susanna Trnka
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Martin Heidegger ◽  
Family Members ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Body ◽  
Dance Floor ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
Czech Society ◽  
Ethnographic Analysis

This book is about our ways of seeing, experiencing, and moving through the world and how they shape the kinds of people we become. Drawing from concepts developed by two phenomenological philosophers, Martin Heidegger and Jan Patočka, and putting them in conversation with ethnographic analysis of the lives of contemporary Czechs, the book examines how embodiment is crucial for understanding our being-in-the-world. In particular, the book scrutinizes three kinds of movements we make as embodied actors in the world: how we move through time and space, be it by walking along city streets, gliding across the dance floor, or clicking our way through digital landscapes; how we move toward and away from one another, as erotic partners, family members, or fearful, ethnic “others”; and how we move toward ourselves and the earth we live on. Above all, the book focuses on tracing the ways in which the body and motion are fundamental to our lived experience of the world, so we can develop a better understanding of the empirical details of Czech society and what they can reveal to us about the human condition.

scholarly journals Letting-be: Dwelling, Peace and Violence in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Petals of Blood

2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-26
Author(s):  
Grant Farred
Keyword(s):  
Martin Heidegger ◽  
Great Difficulty ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
The Earth ◽  
To Receive

It is dwelling that allows mortals to initiate themselves in time and space. As such, dwelling constitutes the event of being. In his essay “Building Dwelling Thinking,” Martin Heidegger stipulates that dwelling can only be achieved through harmonious relations among the constituents, earth, sky, mortals and gods (“divinities”), of the “fourfold.” Heidegger writes, “To preserve the fourfold, to save the earth, to receive the sky, to await the divinities, to initiate mortals – this fourfold preserving is the simple essence of dwelling.” Initiating themselves in time and space is the great difficulty that the residents of Ilmorog, the remote village in postcolonial Kenya in which Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s novel Petals of Blood is set, experience; in Petals of Blood, dwelling is what defines mortals’ being.

Exiting Socialism Challenges

2006 ◽  
pp. 114-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. Popov
Keyword(s):  
Social Challenges ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
Science And Culture ◽  
Municipal Economy

Exiting socialism by almost a third of the earth population appears to be the most prominent event of the late XX century. The author makes an attempt to formulate some challenges of this process and thus a theory of exiting socialism. First, he inquires into the concept of exiting socialism as it exists in the world. Then he analyzes real experiences in this field. The research enables the author to outline the main economic, governmental and social challenges of such exit - from municipal economy to science and culture.

Waste and Welter: Derrida's Environment

2010 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roy Sellars
Keyword(s):  
Martin Heidegger ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Environmental Issues ◽  
Wallace Stevens ◽  
The Earth

At first sight, environmental issues do not seem to feature prominently, if at all, in the work of Jacques Derrida. This essay aims to take a closer look, and thereby to issue a challenge to the burgeoning discipline of eco-criticism. Instead of promoting the Beautiful Soul who is equipped to save the planet by virtue of reading poetry, I argue for the ethical primacy of waste and welter (to recycle a phrase from Wallace Stevens). Jonathan Bate's The Song of the Earth, a powerful but pious work of eco-criticism, ends with a test proposed to the reader; I take the test, which entails reading Stevens's late poem ‘The Planet on the Table’, and fail. Bate's invocation of Martin Heidegger is briefly examined, as are traces of Derrida. What remains of Derrida, I propose, is neither method nor concept but rather remainders that trouble the grounding of environment (Umwelt) as such.

Slavery and the Trumpocene: It's Not the End of the World

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-50
Author(s):  
Claire Colebrook
Keyword(s):  
Living System ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
First Century ◽  
The West ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
End Of The World ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Geological Period

There is something more catastrophic than the end of the world, especially when ‘world’ is understood as the horizon of meaning and expectation that has composed the West. If the Anthropocene is the geological period marking the point at which the earth as a living system has been altered by ‘anthropos,’ the Trumpocene marks the twenty-first-century recognition that the destruction of the planet has occurred by way of racial violence, slavery and annihilation. Rather than saving the world, recognizing the Trumpocene demands that we think about destroying the barbarism that has marked the earth.

‘A pinch of unseen, unguarded dust’: The World and Self in Thomas Hardy's Poems

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-66
Author(s):  
Monika Szuba
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Phenomenological Philosophy ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Recurrent Theme ◽  
Body Subject

The essay discusses selected poems from Thomas Hardy's vast body of poetry, focusing on representations of the self and the world. Employing Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concepts such as the body-subject, wild being, flesh, and reversibility, the essay offers an analysis of Hardy's poems in the light of phenomenological philosophy. It argues that far from demonstrating ‘cosmic indifference’, Hardy's poetry offers a sympathetic vision of interrelations governing the universe. The attunement with voices of the Earth foregrounded in the poems enables the self's entanglement in the flesh of the world, a chiasmatic intertwining of beings inserted between the leaves of the world. The relation of the self with the world is established through the act of perception, mainly visual and aural, when the body becomes intertwined with the world, thus resulting in a powerful welding. Such moments of vision are brief and elusive, which enhances a sense of transitoriness, and, yet, they are also timeless as the self becomes immersed in the experience. As time is a recurrent theme in Hardy's poetry, this essay discusses it in the context of dwelling, the provisionality of which is demonstrated in the prevalent sense of temporality, marked by seasons and birdsong, which underline the rhythms of the world.

Delving into Horror

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (5) ◽  
pp. 135-150
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
The Third ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Perception Of Time ◽  
Definition Of

The springboard for this essay is the author’s encounter with the feeling of horror and her attempts to understand what place horror has in philosophy. The inquiry relies upon Leonid Lipavsky’s “Investigation of Horror” and on various textual plunges into the fanged and clawed (and possibly noumenal) abyss of Nick Land’s work. Various experiences of horror are examined in order to build something of a typology, while also distilling the elements characteristic of the experience of horror in general. The essay’s overall hypothesis is that horror arises from a disruption of the usual ways of determining the boundaries between external things and the self, and this leads to a distinction between three subtypes of horror. In the first subtype, horror begins with the indeterminacy at the boundaries of things, a confrontation with something that defeats attempts to define it and thereby calls into question the definition of the self. In the second subtype, horror springs from the inability to determine one’s own boundaries, a process opposed by the crushing determinacy of the world. In the third subtype, horror unfolds by means of a substitution of one determinacy by another which is unexpected and ungrounded. In all three subtypes of horror, the disturbance of determinacy deprives the subject, the thinking entity, of its customary foundation for thought, and even of an explanation of how that foundation was lost; at times this can lead to impairment of the perception of time and space. Understood this way, horror comes within a hair’s breadth of madness - and may well cross over into it.

Ups and Downs

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roy Livermore
Keyword(s):  
Mantle Convection ◽  
Laboratory Experiments ◽  
Inner Core ◽  
Computer Modelling ◽  
Great Depth ◽  
New Horizons ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
The 1960S

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.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document