Chaosmos
Chaosmos

Author: Philip Kuberski

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 1994-01-01

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 9780791419137

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This book shows how writers like James Joyce, James Merrill, and Doris Lessing; scientists like Gregory Bateson, Ilya Prigogine, and David Bohm; and theorists like Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Serres forecasted and initiated a shift away from modernist conceptions of the world as a machine; the self as an isolated, enclosed principle, and representation as a reductive survey of the world and the self. The focus of this book is the "chaosmos" (a Joycean coinage) apparent within the atom and also within analogous "nuclear" sites such as the self, the word, the organism, and the world. By "chaosmos," Kuberski intends a unitary and yet untotalized--a chiasmic--concept of the world as a field of inevitable and intermittent interference and convergence, a multi-leveled complexity from which emerge organisms, languages, and selves. In exploring and mapping chaosmos, Kuberski emphasizes significant convergences of literary and philosophic, deconstructive and organistic, Eastern and Western, and scientific and humanistic points of view.

The Multivoiced Body
The Multivoiced Body

Author: Fred Evans

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2009-03-30

Total Pages: 367

ISBN-13: 0231519362

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Ethnic cleansing and other methods of political and social exclusion continue to thrive in our globalized world, complicating the idea that unity and diversity can exist in the same society. When we emphasize unity, we sacrifice heterogeneity, yet when we stress diversity, we create a plurality of individuals connected only by tenuous circumstance. As long as we remain tethered to these binaries, as long as we are unable to imagine the sort of society we want in an age of diversity, we cannot achieve an enduring solution to conflicts that continue unabated despite our increasing proximity to one another. By envisioning the public as a multivoiced body, Fred Evans offers a solution to the dilemma of diversity. The multivoiced body is both one and many: heterogeneous voices that at once separate and bind themselves together through their continuous and creative interplay. By focusing on this traditionally undervalued or overlooked notion of voice, Evans shows how we can valorize simultaneously the solidarity, diversity, and richness of society. Moreover, recognition of society as a multivoiced body helps resists the pervasive countertendency to raise a chosen discourse to the level of "one true God," "pure race," or some other "oracle" that eliminates the dynamism of contesting voices. To support these views, Evans taps the major figures and themes of analytic and continental philosophy as well as modernist, postmodernist, postcolonial, and feminist thought. He also turns to sources outside of philosophy to address the implications of his views for justice, citizenship, democracy, and collective as well as individual rights. Through the seemingly simple conceit of a multivoiced body, Evans straddles both philosophy and political practice, confronting issues of subjectivity, language, communication, and identity. For anyone interested in moving toward a just society and politics, The Multivoiced Body offers an innovative approach to the problems of human diversity and ethical plurality.

Eco's Chaosmos
Eco's Chaosmos

Author: Cristina Farronato

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2003-01-01

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 9780802085863

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While Umberto Eco's intellectual itinerary was marked by his early studies of post-Crocean aesthetics and his spectacular concentration on linguistics, information theory, structuralism, semiotics, cognitive science, and media studies, what constitutes the peculiarity of his critical and fiction writing is the tension between a typically medieval search for a code and the hermeneutic representative of deconstructive tendencies. This tension between cosmos and chaos, order and disorder, is reflected in the word chaosmos. In this brilliant assessment of the philosophical basis of Eco's critical and fictional writing, Cristina Farronato explores the other distinctive aspect of Eco's thought - the struggle for a composition of opposites, the outcome deriving from his ability to elicit similar contrasts from the past and re-play them in modern terms. Focusing principally on how Eco's scholarly background influenced his study of semiotics, Farronato analyzes The Name of the Rose in relation to William of Ockham's epistemology, C.S. Peirce's work on abduction, and Wittgenstein's theory of language. She discusses Foucault's Pendulum as an explicit comment on the modern debate on interpretation through a direct reference to Early Modern hermetic thought, correlates The Island of the Day Before as a postmodern mixture of science and superstition, and reviews Baudolino as an historical/fantastic novel that once again situates the Middle Ages in a postmodern context. Eco's Chaosmos demonstrates how Eco's use of semiotic theory is important for an understanding of the postmodern aspects of today's literature and culture.

On the Verge of a Planetary Civilization
On the Verge of a Planetary Civilization

Author: Sam Mickey

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2014-09-18

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 1783481382

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On the Verge of a Planetary Civilization presents a philosophical contribution to integral ecology—an emerging approach to the field that crosses disciplinary boundaries of the humanities and sciences. In this original book, Sam Mickey argues for the transdisciplinary significance of philosophical concepts that facilitate understandings of and responses to the boundaries involved in ecological issues. Mickey demonstrates how much the provocative French philosopher Gilles Deleuze contributes to the development of such concepts, situating his work in dialogue with that of his colleagues Felix Guattari and Jacques Derrida, and with theorists who are adapting his concepts in contemporary contexts such as Isabelle Stengers, Catherine Keller, and the speculative realist movement of object-oriented ontology. The book focuses on the overlapping existential, social and environmental aspects of the ecological problems pervading our increasingly interconnected planet. It explores the boundaries between self and other, humans and nonhumans, sciences and humanities, monism and pluralism, sacred and secular, fact and fiction, the beginning and end of the world, and much more.

Philosophy at the Edge of Chaos
Philosophy at the Edge of Chaos

Author: Jeffrey A. Bell

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2006-01-01

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0802094090

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From the early 1960s until his death, French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) wrote many influential works on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. One of Deleuze's main philosophical projects was a systematic inversion of the traditional relationship between identity and difference. This Deleuzian philosophy of difference is the subject of Jeffrey A. Bell's Philosophy at the Edge of Chaos. Bell argues that Deleuze's efforts to develop a philosophy of difference are best understood by exploring both Deleuze's claim to be a Spinozist, and Nietzsche's claim to have found in Spinoza an important precursor. Beginning with an analysis of these claims, Bell shows how Deleuze extends and transforms concepts at work in Spinoza and Nietzsche to produce a philosophy of difference that promotes and, in fact, exemplifies the notions of dynamic systems and complexity theory. With these concepts at work, Deleuze constructs a philosophical approach that avoids many of the difficulties that linger in other attempts to think about difference. Bell uses close readings of Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, and Whitehead to illustrate how Deleuze's philosophy is successful in this regard and to demonstrate the importance of the historical tradition for Deleuze. Far from being a philosopher who turns his back on what is taken to be a mistaken metaphysical tradition, Bell argues that Deleuze is best understood as a thinker who endeavoured to continue the work of traditional metaphysics and philosophy.

Poststructuralist Geographies
Poststructuralist Geographies

Author: Marcus A. Doel

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 9780847698196

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This work is the first attempt to integrate poststructuralist thought with the insights of critical human geography. Doel does not seek to make conventional approximations of poststrucuralist concepts but to rethink and rewrite the world through them.

Virtual Marshall McLuhan
Virtual Marshall McLuhan

Author: Donald Theall

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2001-01-19

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0773568824

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Donald Theall explores and explains the significance of the emergence of McLuhan as an important figure in North America in the development of an understanding of culture, communication, and technology. He reveals important information about McLuhan and his relationships with his earliest collaborator and life-long friend, anthropologist Edmund Carpenter, as well as with Theall himself, McLuhan's first doctoral student. McLuhan emerges as a complex human being, at once attractive, witty, egotistic, and exasperating. Theall examines McLuhan's many roles - proponent of a poetic method; pop guru adopted by Tom Wolfe, Woody Allen and others; North American precursor of French theory (Baudrillard, Barthes, Derrida, Deleuze); artist; and shaman. Complex and intellectual, neither uncritical adulation nor demonization, The Virtual Marshall McLuhan does justice to a unique figure caught in a struggle between tradition and modernity, between faith and anarchy.

Nature's Transcendence and Immanence
Nature's Transcendence and Immanence

Author: Jea Sophia Oh

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2017-12-22

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 1498562760

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What does it mean for nature to be sacred? Is anything supernatural or even unnatural? Nature’s Transcendence and Immanence: A Comparative Interdisciplinary Ecstatic Naturalism discusses nature’s divinizing process of unfolding and folding through East-West dialogues and interdisciplinary methodologies. Nature’s selving/god-ing processes are the sacred that is revealed as nature’s transcendent and immanent dimensions. Each chapter of Nature’s Transcendence and Immanence: A Comparative Interdisciplinary Ecstatic Naturalism shares a part of nature’s sacred folds that are complexes within nature that have unusual semiotic density. These discussions serve to help restore a better relationship to nature as a whole through an innovative combination of research and ideas from a variety of traditions and disciplines. This collection not only introduces ecstatic naturalism and deep pantheism as sacred practices of philosophy and theology, but also invites a broader audience from a wide range of academic disciplines such as neuro-psychoanalysis, aesthetics, mythology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence (AI).

The Creation of Chaos
The Creation of Chaos

Author: Frederick J. Ruf

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 1991-01-01

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 9780791407011

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This is the first book-length study of William James' style, arguing that the manner in which James writes The Principles of Psychology and The Varieties of Religious Experience serves to construct a chaotic world for his readers. The book examines the uses of chaos in western literature and philosophy and reaches two conclusions: that chaos may be "utter confusion and disorder," but, paradoxically, that disorder is communicated through some particular order -- in Joyce's term, all chaos is "chaosmos." Secondly, what is essential about chaos is what it does: nothing is inherently chaotic, rather chaos is used to contrast with or challenge something that is more structured or formed. Finally, the author presents an examination of the religious function of James' chaotic worldview as a disorientation which orients.

Umberto Eco, The Da Vinci Code, and the Intellectual in the Age of Popular Culture
Umberto Eco, The Da Vinci Code, and the Intellectual in the Age of Popular Culture

Author: Douglass Merrell

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-06-05

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 3319547895

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This book provides a philosophical overview of Umberto Eco's historical and cultural development as a unique, internationally recognized public intellectual who communicates his ideas to both an academic and a popular audience. It describes Eco’s intellectual development from his childhood during World War II and student involvement as a Catholic youth activist and scholar of the Middle Ages, to his early writings on the "openness" of modern works such as Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Merrell also explores Eco’s pioneering role in semiotics and his later career as a novelist.