11 research outputs found

    The built environment, cognition and the image: towards an architectural epistemology

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    Man is increasingly assuming conscious control over his physical environment. The impact of rapidly accelerating scientific and technological progress has resulted in the environment being increasingly man-made and man-influenced. The growing urban population has necessitated building at a rate and quantity greater than ever before. Enormous resources, both human and material, are being channelled on an unprecedented scale into the planning, designing and construction of new environments for human use. Whilst this tide of energy and activity continues to surge forward, creating vast urban and suburban. developments, very little energy and resources have, by comparison, been directed towards critically assessing the impact that these built environments have on people, and the extent to which they are responsive to human needs and aspirations. It has become critical for the architect to be made fully aware of the human implications of the physical environment he is creating. Concern for the human element has been eclipsed by the current pre-occupation of the design profession with technology and economics which have become the dominant design imperatives

    Communication in the organization as a socio-technical system

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    Dissertation (Ph.D.)--University of Kansas, Speech and Drama, 1974

    Toward an Ecological Culture: Sustainability, Post-domination and Spirituality

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    This essay presents an overview of an emergent culture of ecological consciousness and sensitivity for nature within and without humans. The inquiry pertains to the interdisciplinary field of human ecology. The essential methodological approach is eco-systemic, implying the basic interrelatedness of entities and their environment. The essay explores the interconnections at various levels of human-ecological interaction, analyzed from the perspective of the basic components of an ecological culture: sustainability - as an economy of metabolic exchange with the environment and inclusion into natural cycles of renewal; post-domination - as human relations based on individuals\u27 responsibility for their social and natural environment, and on surpassing the authoritarian structures of subordination of humans and nature; and a spirituality of immanent ethic and sensitivity. Individual responsibility is the core of an ecological culture, and the basis of an ecological consciousness - an awareness of the ecological context of the individual\u27s life process - the impact which the ways of satisfying the individual\u27s needs have on the immediate, and also the wider social, biological and physical environment. Ecological culture involves the revitalization of the local community and the household as the levels of immediate human-ecological interactions. The lack of individual responsibility is both caused by and expressed in domination patterns. Domination is based on dualism. Its essential routines are inferiorization and exclusion of mutuality which entail a lack of empathy and harmony - thus hindering a positive relation to the social and natural environment. When domination structures are deconstructed, a possibility of a new integration emerges in the reconsidered sphere of spirituality, involving immanence (re-connection of spirituality and nature), and integrative epistemology (inclusion of other-than-rational modes of comprehension and communication). An essential epistemological component is a sensitivity which links life processes in and around us, thus enabling us to feel that we are part of natural renewal and energy exchange. Such a sensitivity is the basis for individual responsibility which is no longer a matter of reliance on external authority and imposed morality of prescribed rights and duties. Responsibility becomes an individual\u27s inner ethic of joy as an ultimate expression of livelines

    Bowdoin College Catalogue (2007-2008)

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    https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/course-catalogues/1288/thumbnail.jp

    Bowdoin Orient v.113, no.1-25 (1983-1984)

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    https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/bowdoinorient-1980s/1004/thumbnail.jp

    Bowdoin Orient v.116, no.1-27 (1986-1987)

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    https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/bowdoinorient-1980s/1007/thumbnail.jp

    The secular covenant : contractarian metaphor in the mythopoesy of civility and order

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    "Two elements, therefore, enter into the object of our investigation; the first, the idea, the second the complex of human passions; the one the warp, the other the woof of the vast arras- web of history." Hegel, Philosophy of History The 'mythopoesy' of civility and order is the seminal philosophical and theological literature that gave rise to, and reflected, various problems in Western thought focusing on the relationship between citizen and state, in particular, the germinal question of civil obligation: why ought one obey the law? Political theorists engage in metaphoric/raythopoeic thinking in a variety of ways ranging between the archetypal poles of the 'hedgehog' and the 'fox'. Citing the Greek poet Archilochus, Isaiah Berlin interprets the symbol of the fox as those persons who take the objects of experience for what they are and adamantly reject an all-embracing moral principle of unifying vision. By contrast, Berlin portrays the hedgehog as the writers who relate phenomena to a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance. While the hedgehog and the fox do not lend themselves to neat and mutually exclusive categories, they nevertheless suggest something important about the nature and problem of metaphor in political literature. Plato and Hobbes are surely hedgehogs; Machiavelli is equally clearly a fox; Rousseau, consistent with his work, remains a paradox. We cannot claim that the hedgehog is always a monist or nominalist because Plato and Hobbes divide on this point. Nor can we assert that foxes are exclusively pluralist or naturalist, for Hobbes is not a fox though a nominalist, and Machiavelli, though a fox, shows occasional signs of the hedgehog. Any dichotomy over-simplifies and in the extreme voids a complex and diverse world of its fluidity. Yet, when taken as suggestive points of departure, such categories as these aid us in discussing the presuppositions and implications of political metaphors

    Drawing and the drawing activity

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    This thesis is a philosophical examination of the phenomenon of drawing. Drawing is considered as the means whereby the draughtsman makes actual, through making graphic, his perceptual interchange with and implicit reflection of the world. The concern is set not so much in what is affected, as what is being affected. Drawing is viewed primarily as process, as the movement toward meaning. This movement is evidence of the draughtsman's imaginative engagement and brings space and time together. Through his drawing, caught within all its material structuring, he temporalises space and spatialises time. These together found and promote its image. The drawing, as image in form, demonstrates the draughtsman's move from the 'lived' of his experience to the 'thought about'. His transcription moreover discloses an intrinsic subject/object dialectic and founds the whole possibility of the drawing's 'world', ordered and sustained through all its representative and expressive potential. In this context the views of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Dufrenne, Wollheim and Witkin among others are examined. In the light of these theoretical considerations and as visual support for the arg-wnents, the drawings of five draughtsmen are discussed. These are further amplified €hrough transcripts of conversations about their own drawing activity. The work of three of these is presented through time-lapse sequence photographs, to give opportunity to discuss in detail the process of the activity itself. The thesis maintains that the draughtsman is a phenomenologist. Within the scope of all the ways he makes his marks, through all their transmutations, he seeks routes for the interrogation of how things are. Through his drawings he seeks to inscribe a fecund spatiality that gives visibility back to vision. This is the ontological status of drawing and this is the phenomenological concern
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