Being and Literature: The Disclosure of Place in Modernity

The dissertation develops an original ontology of place by reading Modernist literature (1864-1950) as a critical reaction to Modern philosophy (1641-1800), and builds a platform upon movements implicit in literature from which future metaphysical and epistemological inquiries can begin. Western metaphysics and epistemology have been conditioned by the Cartesian commitment to the ego cogito, primarily understood as a subject to which the world appears as represented in concepts or ideas. The postmodern and deconstructive criticisms of such philosophical foundations – and indeed, on the very notion of foundation itself – have become well worn, but have failed to offer a viable alternative, everywhere heralding the “end of metaphysics” while simultaneously carrying on metaphysical discourse as if unaware of their own dictum! Being and Literature: The Disclosure of Place in Modernity offers the ontology of place as an alternative to postmodern anti-realism, showing that Modernist literature prefigures the postmodern critical project and implicitly leads the way toward an ontology of place that would de-center the cogito subject from the heart of Western metaphysics and epistemology. We avoid anti-realism through the reading of Modernism, while developing the alternative placial ontology capable of responding the weaknesses of postmodern anti-realism

Geographical information retrieval with ontologies of place

Geographical context is required of many information retrieval tasks in which the target of the search may be documents, images or records which are referenced to geographical space only by means of place names. Often there may be an imprecise match between the query name and the names associated with candidate sources of information. There is a need therefore for geographical information retrieval facilities that can rank the relevance of candidate information with respect to geographical closeness of place as well as semantic closeness with respect to the information of interest. Here we present an ontology of place that combines limited coordinate data with semantic and qualitative spatial relationships between places. This parsimonious model of geographical place supports maintenance of knowledge of place names that relate to extensive regions of the Earth at multiple levels of granularity. The ontology has been implemented with a semantic modelling system linking non-spatial conceptual hierarchies with the place ontology. An hierarchical spatial distance measure is combined with Euclidean distance between place centroids to create a hybrid spatial distance measure. This is integrated with thematic distance, based on classification semantics, to create an integrated semantic closeness measure that can be used for a relevance ranking of retrieved objects

An ontology of place and service types to facilitate place-affordance geographic information retrieval

In order to facilitate place-affordance queries on the Web, this work proposes the employment of an ontology of place and service types. While other works defined place-affordance by associating a place with its physical objects, the conceptual view of a place-affordance in this work is based on associating a place type with its typical service types, which is reflected in the ontology construction methodology. Preliminary results, as well as an overview of the current work, are briefly introduced

Editor's Introduction

The twentieth century was deeply influenced by theoretical-practical and reflective developments in philosophical hermeneutics. It introduced a large range of problems, content and perspectives, on a vast referential and implicational (inter-)disciplinary scale, to enter into the real orbit of a philosophical koinè, not for a decennary or few decennaries (Vattimo), but for a century and more. It expressed the productivity, significance and heuristic strength of research and thought that hit different scientific domains, particularly (but not exclusively) the human and social sciences: from psychology to sociology, from psychoanalysis to literature, from semiotic to biblical exegesis, from anthropology to linguistics, from rhetoric to narratology, from history to law and from political theory to religion

Introduction – Ricœur and the Problem of Space. Perspectives on a Ricœurian “Spatial Turn”

Introduction to special issue "Ricoeur and the Problem of Space"English introduction to the special issue "Ricœur and the Problem of Space

“If I am from Megara.” Introduction to the Local Discourse Environment of an Ancient Greek City-State

The introduction to the volume discusses, first, the conceptual framework of localism and the local in the ancient Greek world. Each city-state cultivated its own identity of place. In doing so, the polis was subject to a local discourse environment that set it apart from other cities. In the second section, the article examines the various manifestations of this environment in Megara, exploring multiple facets and fragments of the local discourse in the city. In sum, the author looks at Greek history through a decidedly local lens, explaining how the Megarians viewed the world around them and what it meant ‘to be from Megara’

The primacy of place in education in outdoor settings

In this chapter, we will show when and how place needs to be and can be reasserted as a key unifying concern for outdoor pedagogy. We argue for place-responsiveness as viable purposeful direction for outdoor education that allows us to address linked relational concerns: the development of the person, the development of skills and practice abilities, and the development of more sustainable relations with and in place. We trace when and how place is gaining more of a platform as a key aspect of international educational policy developments. The turn towards place in academic writing is noted and explored. Employing a relational ontology, we argue for place-responsiveness in outdoor education. To realise placeresponsiveness will require a widening of the frame of reference and a dynamic approach since the elements involved in place-as-event mean that place-based entities and people are relationally co-emerging. We offer a typology for planning with place in mind and a manifesto for placeresponsive outdoor teaching