Download or read book Dante s Broken Hammer written by Graham Harman and published by Watkins Media Limited. This book was released on 2016-10-18 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book the founder of object-oriented philosophy transforms one of the classic poets of the Western canon, Dante Alighieri, into an edgy stimulus for contemporary continental thought. It is well known that Dante's poetic works interpret love as the moving force of the universe: as embodied in his muse Beatrice from La Vita Nuova onward, as well as the much holier persons inhabiting Paradiso. Likewise, if love is the ultimate form of sincerity, it is easy to interpret the Inferno as a brilliant counterpoint of anti-sincerity, governed by fraud and blasphemy along with the innocuous form of fraud known as humor (strangely absent from all parts of Dante's cosmos other than hell). In turn, the middle ground of Purgatorio is where Harman locates Dante's clearest theory of sincerity. Yet this is only the beginning. For while Dante provides a suitable background for the metaphysics of commitment found in such later thinkers as Pascal, Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Badiou, he also provides even more important resources for overcoming two centuries of philosophy shaped by Immanuel Kant.
Download or read book Aesthetics Equals Politics written by Mark Foster Gage and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-04-16 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How aesthetics—understood as a more encompassing framework for human activity—might become the primary discourse for political and social engagement. These essays make the case for a reignited understanding of aesthetics—one that casts aesthetics not as illusory, subjective, or superficial, but as a more encompassing framework for human activity. Such an aesthetics, the contributors suggest, could become the primary discourse for political and social engagement. Departing from the “critical” stance of twentieth-century artists and theorists who embraced a counter-aesthetic framework for political engagement, this book documents how a broader understanding of aesthetics can offer insights into our relationships not only with objects, spaces, environments, and ecologies, but also with each other and the political structures in which we are all enmeshed. The contributors—philosophers, media theorists, artists, curators, writers and architects including such notable figures as Jacques Rancière, Graham Harman, and Elaine Scarry—build a compelling framework for a new aesthetic discourse. The book opens with a conversation in which Rancière tells the volume's editor, Mark Foster Gage, that the aesthetic is “about the experience of a common world.” The essays following discuss such topics as the perception of reality; abstraction in ethics, epistemology, and aesthetics as the “first philosophy”; Afrofuturism; Xenofeminism; philosophical realism; the productive force of alienation; and the unbearable lightness of current creative discourse. Contributors Mark Foster Gage, Jacques Rancière, Elaine Scarry, Graham Harman, Timothy Morton, Ferda Kolatan, Adam Fure, Michael Young, Nettrice R. Gaskins, Roger Rothman, Diann Bauer, Matt Shaw, Albena Yaneva, Brett Mommersteeg, Lydia Kallipoliti, Ariane Lourie Harrison, Rhett Russo, Peggy Deamer, Caroline Picard Matt Shaw, Managing Editor
Download or read book Dante s Inferno written by Raymond Angelo Belliotti and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-04-08 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a recipe for healthy moral and personal transformation. Belliotti takes seriously Dante’s deepest yearnings: to guide human well-being; to elevate social and political communities; to remedy the poisons spewed by the seven capital vices; and to celebrate the connections between human self-interest, virtuous living, and spiritual salvation. By closely examining and analyzing five of Dante’s more vivid characters in hell—Piero della Vigna, Brunetto Latini, Farinata degli Uberti, Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti, and Guido da Montefeltro—and extracting the moral lessons Dante intends them to convey, and by conceptually analyzing envy, arrogance, pride, and human flourishing, the author challenges readers to interrogate and refine their modes of living.
Download or read book Architecture and Objects written by Graham Harman and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2022-07-26 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thinking through object-oriented ontology—and the work of architects such as Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid—to explore new concepts of the relationship between form and function Object-oriented ontology has become increasingly popular among architectural theorists and practitioners in recent years. Architecture and Objects, the first book on architecture by the founder of object-oriented ontology (OOO), deepens the exchange between architecture and philosophy, providing a new roadmap to OOO’s influence on the language and practice of contemporary architecture and offering new conceptions of the relationship between form and function. Graham Harman opens with a critique of Heidegger, Derrida, and Deleuze, the three philosophers whose ideas have left the deepest imprint on the field, highlighting the limits of their thinking for architecture. Instead, Harman contends, architecture can employ OOO to reconsider traditional notions of form and function that emphasize their relational characteristics—form with a building’s visual style, function with its stated purpose—and constrain architecture’s possibilities through literalism. Harman challenges these understandings by proposing de-relationalized versions of both (zero-form and zero-function) that together provide a convincing rejoinder to Immanuel Kant’s dismissal of architecture as “impure.” Through critical engagement with the writings of Peter Eisenman and fresh assessments of buildings by Rem Koolhaas, Frank Gehry, and Zaha Hadid, Architecture and Objects forwards a bold vision of architecture. Overcoming the difficult task of “zeroing” function, Harman concludes, would place architecture at the forefront of a necessary revitalization of exhausted aesthetic paradigms.
Download or read book Skirmishes written by Graham Harman and published by punctum books. This book was released on 2020-11-17 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Graham Harman Reader written by Graham Harman and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2023-02-24 with total page 841 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Overcoming the war of religion between analytics and continentals with a brand-new metaphysical insight, Graham Harman has restored to philosophy its greatness and value.' Maurizio Ferraris, Italian continental philosopher and author of the Manifesto of New Realism The Graham Harman Reader is the essential compendium of shorter works by one of the most influential philosophers of the twenty-first century. The writings in this volume are split into seven chapters. The first concerns Harman’s resistance to both downward and upward reductionism. The second chapter contains works that develop the specific fourfold structure of Object-Oriented Ontology. In the third, we find Harman’s novel arguments for why causal relations between two entities can only be indirect. The fourth chapter discusses why aesthetics deserves to be called first philosophy. The fifth chapter contains Harman’s underrated contributions to ethics and politics, and the sixth deals with epistemology, mind, and science. A concluding seventh chapter contains several previously unpublished writings not available anywhere else. Written in Harman’s typical clear and witty style, the /Reader/ is an essential resource for veteran readers of Harman and newcomers alike.
Download or read book The Object as a Process written by Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2022-12-31 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does artistic practice lead to the production of knowledge? How does, in turn, artistic knowledge relate to its material base? How does contingent materiality guide the artist towards finding form and developing a statement? This volume is dedicated to the object as a process in order to offer new insights into the ways the object - broadly construed, comprising digital and other non-classical objects - becomes an active element in artistic practice.
Download or read book Ecologies of Inception written by Simone Ferracina and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-05-31 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Responding to increasing levels of planetary pollution, waste generation, carbon dioxide emission and environmental collapse, Ecologies of Inception re-thinks potentiality—an object’s ability to change—in architecture and design. The book problematizes the still-prevailing modern paradigm of design practice: the technical tabula rasa, a tendency to begin from scratch and use raw, amorphous, and obedient materials that can be easily and effectively manipulated, facilitating a seamless and faithful embodiment of intentions. Instead, the philosophy of design developed in the text prompts—through a variety of case studies, thinkers, and disciplines—a collective reconsideration of value, dissociating it from the projects and signatures of any one author or generation. Whereas the merits of up-cycling and circular design are canonically defined vis-à-vis status-quo economic and socio-cultural orthodoxies, this project unpacks the theoretical assumptions that underpin these practices, showing that they perpetuate the same biases and exclusions that generate waste in the first place. As an alternative, the book introduces a nodal and exaptive paradigm for design: a conceptual and methodological toolset for engaging the durational and anthropocenic materiality of the third millennium, and for radically prioritizing practices of maintenance, reuse, care, and co-option. This approach, which is inspired by (and builds upon) evolutionary biology, technological disobedience, queer use, adaptive reuse, experimental preservation, and improvisational practices such as collage, adhocism, bricolage, and kit-bashing, refuses to reduce pre-existing material substrates to abstract lists of properties or featureless lumps, encountering them on their own terms—as situated individuals and co-authors. Ecologies of Inception will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, educators, and professional architects and designers interested in sustainable design and seeking to develop conceptual and design tools commensurate with the magnitude and urgency of the climate emergency.
Download or read book New Directions in Philosophy and Literature written by Rudrum David Rudrum and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-22 with total page 723 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This forward-thinking, non-traditional reference work uniquely maps out how new developments in 21st century philosophy are entering into dialogue with the study of literature. Going beyond the familiar methods of analytic philosophy, and with a breadth greater than traditional literary theory, this collection looks at the profound consequences of the interaction between philosophy and literature for questions of ethics, politics, subjectivity, materiality, reality and the nature of the contemporary itself.
Download or read book Isotopography written by Niels Wilde and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2024-08-19 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While the concept of place remains undertheorized in Kierkegaard research, this study argues that place is at the center of Kierkegaard’s thinking. The first part of the book shows that Kierkegaard’s notion of situatedness as being-placed in a socio-historical situation conditioned by a situation prior to situatedness points to a realist position and a flat ontology. Secondly, the book develops a detailed analysis of the ontological structure of the existential place (the place we ourselves are) and concrete places (the places where we are). Place opens a qualified space within bounds (the existence-sphere), an atmosphere of elemental attunement and attuned elementality. Finally, the book collects the dots from part one and two in a topological realist approach to Kierkegaard’s theology and three main definitions of God: God is love, God is that everything is possible, and God is the middle term. The book concludes that Kierkegaard’s existential topography reveals a realist position: where we are is never exhausted by being the place where we are.
Download or read book Beyond Matter Within Space written by Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás and published by Hatje Cantz Verlag. This book was released on 2024-08-28 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exhibition spaces are physical places of knowledge production and exchange. Their spatial properties play an important role in contextualizing information. Virtual stagings of exhibitions should therefore retain these properties. The Beyond Matter research project (2019–23) aims to unravel the intertwining of physical and virtual structures and their impact on spatial aspects in art production, curating, and art education, and thus to identify ways to preserve cultural heritage in the digital age. This publication offers a comprehensive overview of the diverse research activities, exhibition and book projects, and symposia that have taken place or emerged in the course of the international Beyond Matter project at the various partner institutions.
Download or read book Is there an Object Oriented Architecture written by Joseph Bedford and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-02-20 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing Graham Harman's philosophy into direct confrontation with contemporary architectural theory in new and creative ways, Is There an Object-Oriented Architecture? provides a dialogue between Harman and six of the world's leading architectural thinkers, Adam Sharr, Lorens Holm, Jonathan Hale, Peg Rawes, Patrick Lynch and Peter Carl. Harman's object-oriented philosophy is one that sees the universe as a carnival of equal “objects” with no hierarchy between humans and nonhumans. In his model, unicorns, triangles, bicycles, neutrons, and humans are all things with enduring essences that outlast their partial transformations. It is a strikingly democratic vision of the universe that knocks humans off their ontological pedestal as arbiters of what is real. It also radically challenges the very precepts of architectural theory, the structure of which remains stubbornly human-centric as it seeks to give form to the human being's place at the centre of the cosmos. In this new book, each thinker develops the implications of Harman's philosophy for the future of architecture by entering into a direct exchange with the philosopher and his thinking, both questioning him and questioning with him.
Download or read book New Realism and Contemporary Philosophy written by Gregor Kroupa and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-06-25 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book advances the current debate in continental realism. In the field of contemporary continental ontology, Speculative Realist thinkers are now grappling with the genealogy of their ideas in the history of modern philosophy. The Speculative Realism movement prompted a debate, criticizing the predominant postmodernist orientation in philosophy, which located its origins in Kantian “correlationism” which supposedly ended the period of early modern naive realist metaphysics by showing that the mind and the outside world can only ever be understood as correlates. The debate over a new kind of realism has attracted many supporters and critics. In order to refocus its specific interpretation of modern philosophy in general and of the Kantian gesture in particular, this volume brings together major authors working on contemporary ontology and historians of ideas. It underlines and illustrates the fact that contemporary continental philosophy is rediscovering its past in original ways by productively re-interpreting some of the key concepts of modern philosophy. The perspectives and accounts of the key concepts of the history of philosophy are different in the views of individual contributors, and sometimes radically so, yet the discussion between contemporary realists and their critics shows that the real battleground of new ideas lies not in developing the philosophical motifs of the end of the 20th century, but rather in rethinking the milestones of modern philosophy. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 licence on www.bloomsburycollections.com.
Download or read book Killer Cities written by Nigel Thrift and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2021-02-10 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Killer Cities uses a combination of social theory, polemic and close attention to empirical detail to tell the story of how and why cities cause mass animal death and, in the process, hasten the destruction of the planet. This book is not just a lament, however. It is an attempt to navigate out of this mess of planned and unplanned violence towards a world in which cities no longer act as killers but become aligned with the lives of other beings. It offers pragmatic ways of diminishing the death toll and changing mindsets without ever minimizing the dilemmas that inevitably will have to be faced. Killer cities can be rehabilitated so that they offer brighter paths towards the future - for animals, for human beings, and for the planet. A new urban geography could be within our grasp. Indeed, it has to be, for all of our sakes.
Download or read book Time and History in Prehistory written by Stella Souvatzi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-26 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Time and History in Prehistory explores the many processes through which time and history are conceptualized and constructed, challenging the perception of prehistoric societies as ahistorical. Drawing equally on contemporary theory and illustrative case studies, and firmly rooted in material evidence, this book rearticulates concepts of time and history, questions the kind of narratives to be written about the past and underlines the fundamentally historical nature of prehistory. From a range of multi-disciplinary perspectives, the authors of this volume address the scales at which archaeological evidence and narrative are interwoven, from a single day to deep history and from a solitary pot to a complete city. In doing so, they argue the need for a multi-scalar approach to prehistoric data that allows for the interplay between short and long term, and for analytical units that encourage us to move continuously between scales. The growing interest in time and history in archaeology and across a wide range of disciplines concerned with human action and the human past highlights that these are exceptionally active fields. By juxtaposing varied viewpoints, this volume bridges gaps in narrative, finds a place for inclusive histories and makes clear the benefit of integrative and interdisciplinary approaches, including different disciplines and types of data.
Download or read book The Streets of Baltimore written by Joe Frantz and published by Blackstone Publishing. This book was released on 2023-03-14 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brandon Novak, an actor known for the films Jackass and Viva La Bam, among others, was a teenage skateboarder, but his lust for heroin led to a junkie’s destiny on the streets of Baltimore. Arrests, rehabs, and drug-tortured love triangles consumed Novak’s life, until his childhood friend and Jackass alumnus Bam Margera guided him to MTV fame. But Novak’s stardom led him down a self-destructive path that forced him to sculpt his future. This suspenseful memoir is interspersed with action, humor, and inspiration.
Download or read book Rivista di Estetica 84 written by AA.VV. and published by Rosenberg & Sellier. This book was released on 2024-01-24 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although, in social ontology, the nature of money has been extensively studied, little has been said about the nature of other entities populating the financial world, such as debts, economic exchanges, and price drops. This special issue of Rivista di Estetica gathers novel research papers dealing precisely with some ontological problems pertaining to the finance landscape. While these papers do not exhaust the issues associated with the ontology of finance, they certainly contribute to improving our comprehension of the financial world, which is crucial for both theoretical and practical reasons.
