Topologies Of The Flesh

This is an unprecedented marriage of topology (a branch of mathematics dealing with the properties of geometric figures that stay the same when the figures are distorted) and phenomenology. Through his unique application of qualitative mathematics, Rosen offers a detailed exploration of previously uncharted dimensions of human experience and the natural world.

This unique book offers an original way of thinking about two of the most significant problems confronting modern theoretical physics: the unification of the forces of nature and the evolution of the universe. In bringing out the inadequacies of the prevailing approach to these questions, the author demonstrates the need for more than just a new theory. The meanings of space and time themselves must be radically rethought, which requires a whole new philosophical foundation. To this end, the book turns to the phenomenological writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger. Their insights into space and time bring the natural world to life in a manner well-suited to the dynamic phenomena of contemporary physics. In aligning continental thought with problems in physics and cosmology, the book makes use of topology . Phenomenological intuitions about space and time are systematically fleshed out via an unconventional and innovative approach to this qualitative branch of mathematics. The author''s pioneering work in topological phenomenology is applied to such topics as quantum gravity, cosmogony, symmetry, spin, vorticity, dimension theory, Kaluza-Klein and string theories, fermion-boson interrelatedness, hypernumbers, and the mind-matter interface. Sample Chapter(s). Chapter 1: Introduction Individuation and the Quest for Unity (77 KB). Contents: Introduction: Individuation and the Quest for Unity; The Obstacle to Unification in Modern Physics; The Phenomenological Challenge to the Classical Formula; Topological Phenomenology; The Dimensional Family of Topological Spinors; Basic Principles of Dimensional Transformation; Waves Carrying Waves: The Co-Evolution of Lifeworlds; The Forces of Nature; Cosmogony, Symmetry, and Phenomenological Intuition; The Self-Evolving Cosmos; The Psychophysics of Cosmogony. Readership: Philosophically-oriented readers drawn to current developments in physics and cosmology. For academics and scientists dealing with the foundations of physics, the philosophy of science in general, and or contemporary phenomenological thought.

The inner figure of the blind victim, the one who has the power to withstand the dark pull of the archetypal dynamic of illness/wholeness, was particularly active for a long period of time after I initially lost my eyesight. She kept looking for what I could not see, checking each eye over and over again separately, crying out in despair to the other eye to see if it could not grasp what this one could not. As a metaphor pointing to something not seen—shadow material not identified with—the soul of my blindness kept reaching out past her claustrophobic confinement to the blackness pressing in on her. She was relentless in her efforts to stay connected to the “not-me” that might help her learn how to see in another less literal way. I reflect now on how seeing and my sense of self became symbiotic in that what I could see, I felt was still a part of me; I could still be whole. I still had a relationship with these parts of my experience. And what I could not see, was not lost to me forever vanished as if my very sense of myself was suddenly unavailable, absent. Dead.

From its very beginnings, theatre has been both an art and a public space, shared by actors and spectators. As a result, its entity and history is intimately tied to politics: a politics of inclusion and exclusion, of distributions and placements, of spatial appropriation and utopian concepts. This collection examines what is at stake when a theatrical space is created and when a performance takes place; it asks under what circumstances the topology of theatre becomes political. The book approaches this issue from various angles, taking theatre as a cultural paradigm for political dimensions of space in its respective historical context. Visiting the political dimensions of theatrical space in both theatre history and contemporary performance, the volume responds to the so-called spatial turn in cultural and historical studies, and questions a politics of aesthetics that is discussed in continental philosophy. The book visits different levels and linkages between aesthetic theory and geography, art and sociology, architecture and political theory, and geometry and history, shedding new light on theatre, politics, and space, thereby transforming this historically intertwined triad into a transdisciplinary theme.

What do Einsteinian relativity, eighteenth-century field theory, Neoplatonism, and the overthrow of three-dimensional perspective have in common? The poet and artist William Blake's geometry—the conception of space-time that informs his work across media and genres. In this illuminating, inventive new study, Andrew M. Cooper reveals Blake to be the vehicle of a single imaginative vision in which art, literature, physics, and metaphysics stand united. Romantic-period physics was not, as others have assumed, materialist. Blake's cosmology forms part of his age's deep reevaluation of body and soul, of matter and Heaven, and even probes what it is to understand understanding, reason, and substance. Far from being anti-Newtonian, Blake was prophetically post-Newtonian. His poetry and art realized the revolutionary potential of Enlightened natural philosophy even as that philosophy still needed an Einstein for its physics to snap fully into focus. Blake's mythmaking exploits the imaginative reach of formal abstractions to generate a model of how sensation imparts physical extension to the world. More striking still, Cooper shows how Blake's art of vision leads us today to visualize four-dimensional concepts of space, time, and Man for ourselves.

Taking the view that aesthetics is a study grounded in perception, the essays in this volume exhibit many sides of the perceptual complex that is the aesthetic field and develop them in different ways. They reinvigorate our understanding of such arts as music and architecture; they range across the natural landscape to the urban one; they reassess the place of beauty in the modern environment and reassess the significance of the contributions to aesthetic theory of Kant and Dewey; and they broach the kinds of meanings and larger understanding that aesthetic engagement with the human environment can offer. Written over the past decade, these original and innovative essays lead to a fresh encounter with the possibilities of aesthetic experience, one which has constantly evolved, moving in recent years in the direction of what Berleant terms 'social aesthetics', which enhances human-environmental integration and sociality.

This book examines and explores Jacques Lacan’s controversial topologisation of psychoanalysis, and seeks to persuade the reader that this enterprise was necessary and important. In providing both an introduction to a fundamental component of Lacan’s theories, as well as readings of texts that have been largely ignored, it provides a thorough critical interpretation of his work. Will Greenshields argues that Lacan achieved his most pedagogically clear and successful presentations of his most essential and notoriously complex concepts – such as structure, the subject and the real – through the deployment of topology. The book will help readers to better understand Lacan, and also those concepts that have become prevalent in various intellectual discourses such as contemporary continental philosophy, politics and the study of ideology, and literary or cultural criticism.