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Today, we believe that the map is a copy of the Earth, without realizing that the opposite is true: in our culture the Earth has assumed the form of a map. In Blinding Polyphemus, Franco Farinelli elucidates the philosophical correlation between cultural evolution and shifting cartographies of modern society, giving readers an interdisciplinary study that attempts to understand and redefine the fundamental structures of cartography, architecture, and the notion of "space." Following the lessons of nineteenth-century critical German geography, this is a manual of geography without any map. To indicate where things are means already responding, in implicit and unreflective ways, to prior questions about their nature. Blinding Polyphemus not only takes account of the present state of the Earth and of human geography, it redefines the principal models we possess for the description of the world: the map, above all, as well as the landscape, subject, place, city, and space.
In Literature for Europe? leading scholars from around Europe reflect on the role played by literature, and by the study of literature, in the constant re-negotiation and re-construction of cultural identities in Europe implied by the accession to the European Union, in the early years of the twenty-first century, of fifteen new member states, with the accession of a number of Balkan states impending, and Turkey waiting in the wings, while at the same time transatlantic relations of the EU to the USA are hotly debated, in politics as in culture, China and India awake as economic giants, and globalization is upon us. At the same time, two of the earliest signatories to the treaties eventually...
Piechocki calls for an examination of the idea of Europe as a geographical concept, tracing its development in the 15th and 16th centuries. What is “Europe,” and when did it come to be? In the Renaissance, the term “Europe” circulated widely. But as Katharina N. Piechocki argues in this compelling book, the continent itself was only in the making in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Cartographic Humanism sheds new light on how humanists negotiated and defined Europe’s boundaries at a momentous shift in the continent’s formation: when a new imagining of Europe was driven by the rise of cartography. As Piechocki shows, this tool of geography, philosophy, and philology was used...
This book provides an essential insight into the practices and ideas of maps and map-making. It draws on a wide range of social theorists, and theorists of maps and cartography, to show how maps and map-making have shaped the spaces in which we live. Going beyond the focus of traditional cartography, the book draws on examples of the use of maps from the sixteenth century to the present, including their role in projects of the national and colonial state, emergent capitalism and the planetary consciousness of the natural sciences. It also considers the use of maps for military purposes, maps that have coded modern conceptions of health, disease and social character, and maps of the transparent human body and the transparent earth.
This book investigates the ontological state of relations in a unique way. Starting with the notion of system, it shows that the system can be understood as a relational structure, and that relations can be assessed within themselves, with no need to transform relations in elements. “Relations” are understood in contrast to “relational property”: without a relation there is no identity, therefore no existence. What allows us to do that without hypostatizing the relation, and without immediately taking it simply as a causal relation, can be better grasped, possibly, in reference to a few entities that make best display of their systemic nature, for example images, works of art, and vi...
This contributed volume aims to reconsider the concept of individuation, clarifying its articulation with respect to contemporary problems in perceptual, neural, developmental, semiotic and social morphogenesis. The authors approach the ontogenetical issue by taking into account the morphogenetic process, involving the concept of individuation proposed by Gilbert Simondon and Gilles Deleuze. The target audience primarily comprises experts in the field but the book may also be beneficial for graduate students. The challenge of the genesis and constitution of “units” has always been at the center of philosophical and scientific research. This ontogenetical issue is common to every discipli...
systems such as climate, society, economies and cities." "The book is specifically concerned with cities. The aim of the authors is to promote a new operative approach to the study of urban systems through an integrated, systemic view of their components and relations with the outside. Evolutionary science opens new development prospects for cities in the framework of sustainability." --Book Jacket.
This book is about the representations - both visual and linguistic - which people give of their own places of origin. It examines the drawings of interviewees who were asked to draw their own place of origin on a white A3 sheet, using pencil or colour, according to their choice. If they were born in a place they did not remember because they moved in when they were very small, they could draw the place they did remember as the scenario of their early childhood. The drawings are examined from three different perspectives: semiotics, cognitive psychology and geography. The semiotic instruments are used to describe how each person reconstructs a complex image of his/her childhood place, and ho...
This book investigates how ideas of and discourses about Europe have been affected by images of the Mediterranean Sea and its many worlds from the nineteenth century onwards. Surprisingly, modern scholars have often neglected such an influence and, in fact, in most histories of the idea of Europe the Mediterranean is conspicuously absent. This might partly be explained by the fact that historians have often identified Europe with modernity (and the Atlantic world) and, therefore, in opposition to the classical world (centred around the Mediterranean). This book will challenge such views, showing that a plethora of thinkers, from the early nineteenth century to the present, have refused to re...
While the term ‘Europe’ was used sporadically in ancient and medieval times, it proliferated between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and gained a prevalence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which it did not possess before. Although studies on the history of the idea of Europe abound, much of the vast body of early modern sources has still been neglected. Assuming that discourses tend to transcend linguistic, historical and generic boundaries, this book has gathered experts from various fields of study who examine vernacular and Latin negotiations of Europe from the late fifteenth to the early eighteenth century. This multi-angled approach serves to identify similarities and differences in the discourses on Europe within their different national and cultural communities. Contributors are: Ovanes Akopyan, Volker Bauer, Piotr Chmiel, Nicolas Detering, Stefan Ehrenpreis, Niels Grüne, Peter Hanenberg, Ulrich Heinen, Ronny Kaiser, Niall Oddy, Katharina N. Piechocki, Dennis Pulina, Marion Romberg, Lucie Storchová, Isabella Walser-Bürgler, Michael Wintle, and Enrico Zucchi.