When we are present in a space we have been to before, we remember our experiences or events, people, and things related to that space. However, we can remember a space we have not been to and experiences that do not belong to us. We can have memories of them through transferential spaces created by mediums such as images, films, television, or virtual reality. These virtual spaces enable the transfer of experiences and memories. This study focuses (...) on the relationship between experiences in virtual spaces and memory. It problematizes the change in the quality of experiences in physical and virtual spaces and the memories gained from these experiences. Film and virtual reality mediums are chosen to analyze the changes. The study reveals that depending on the types of mediums, characteristic transformations occur in memories obtained from experiences in virtual spaces. (shrink)

This article interprets David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2001) to argue for the morphological influence cinematic images have on modernity's monstrous identity. It shows how Lynch's tactic of interweaving apparently discrete spaces of dream and reality – one often inverting or uncannily ironising the other – relies on the virtual space of cinema, which leaves a mark on understanding, irrespective of its apparent truth. To do so, I employ Peter Sloterdijk's philosophy of space – especially the spherology developed in (...) his Spheres trilogy – and Bernard Stiegler's approach to cinematic phenomenology to consider the transferential force of cinema, and its power to cultivate and shape popular consciousness. Mulholland Drive is acutely aware of this force, and its interplay with the expectations and disappointments of Hollywood monstrosity inserts itself into the sphere-forming traffic of modern meaning-making. In doing so, I argue, the film takes up Lynch's familiar approach to irony and the weird to unwind the destructive uniformity of Hollywood hegemony. The productive bifurcations that result, inscribed in between cinema and consciousness, and forgettable as the very spheric intimacy of memory, gesture to what might live beyond discrete forms. (shrink)

Psychoanalysis provides a complex discursive matrix for making sense of, or unraveling the existing sense of, textual material in social research. However, the relationship between psychoanalytic work in the clinic and psychoanalytic social research poses a series of questions for those working in each domain. The relationship opened up new fields of enquiry, of empirical and theoretical research, but it also now gives rise to empirical and theoretical problems. This paper is concerned with the elaboration of clinical concepts in the (...) emerging field of psychosocial research, with a particular focus on the use of transference. The paper distinguishes 3 versions of transference in the psychoanalytic tradition, drawing attention to the importance of an “intersubjective” conception of transference in psychosocial research as an alternative to “attachment” models that appeal to mainstream empiricist approaches to psychological inquiry. The third version of transference elaborated in Lacanian psychoanalysis, one concerned with signification, is used to ground an analysis of the clinic as specific space in which the phenomenon manifests itself. Analysis of the clinic as “transferential space” enables us to conceptualize the place of psychoanalysis in the clinic and to question the extrapolation of transference to social research. The paper concludes with a consideration of generalized transference outside the clinic. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Bracha Ettinger (formerly known as Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger) is an Israeli-born Paris-based artist, analyst and feminist theorist who has produced over the last decade a major theoretical intervention through a tripartite practice. This article offers an expository introduction and overview of core aspects of her theoretical contribution while relating it to major trends in feminist and general cultural theory of subjectivity, hysteria, memory, trauma and the aesthetic. Organized in several parts, each section addresses the developing vocabulary, terminology and significance of (...) her work. With core concepts are Matrix, metramorphosis, trans-subjectivity, co-poïesis, co-emergence and co-affection, Ettinger’s theory opens out beyond the blind spots of advanced feminist thought. From its independent and original theorization of subjectivity-as-encounter and an-other sexual difference, Bracha Ettinger challenges our attempts to think about femininity associated with the work of Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. Linked to, but distinct from, the philosophical speculations of Deleuze and Levinas, this work creates a transferential theoretical space for Jewish and feminine difference, sexuality, subjectivity and the traumatic residues of modern catastrophe that has major repercussions for cultural, aesthetic, ethical, political and psychoanalytic theory. (shrink)

Achieving space domain awareness requires the identification, characterization, and tracking of space objects. Storing and leveraging associated space object data for purposes such as hostile threat assessment, object identification, and collision prediction and avoidance present further challenges. Space objects are characterized according to a variety of parameters including their identifiers, design specifications, components, subsystems, capabilities, vulnerabilities, origins, missions, orbital elements, patterns of life, processes, operational statuses, and associated persons, organizations, or nations. The Space Object Ontology (...) provides a consensus-based realist framework for formulating such characterizations in a computable fashion. Space object data are aligned with classes and relations in the Space Object Ontology and stored in a dynamically updated Resource Description Framework triple store, which can be queried to support space domain awareness and the needs of spacecraft operators. This paper presents the core of the Space Object Ontology, discusses its advantages over other approaches to space object classification, and demonstrates its ability to combine diverse sets of data from multiple sources within an expandable framework. Finally, we show how the ontology provides benefits for enhancing and maintaining longterm space domain awareness. (shrink)

Space, Time, and Stuff is an attempt to show that physics is geometry: that the fundamental structure of the physical world is purely geometrical structure. Along the way, he examines some non-standard views about the structure of spacetime and its inhabitants, including the idea that space and time are pointless, the idea that quantum mechanics is a completely local theory, the idea that antiparticles are just particles travelling back in time, and the idea that time has no structure (...) whatsoever. The main thrust of the book, however, is that there are good reasons to believe that spaces other than spacetime exist, and that it is the existence of these additional spaces that allows one to reduce all of physics to geometry. Philosophy, and metaphysics in particular, plays an important role here: the assumption that the fundamental laws of physics are simple in terms of the fundamental physical properties and relations is pivotal."--P. [4] of cover. (shrink)

There is a growing body of scholarship that is addressing the ethics, in particular, the bioethics of space travel and colonisation. Naturally, a variety of perspectives concerning the ethical issues and moral permissibility of different technological strategies for confronting the rigours of space travel and colonisation have emerged in the debate. Approaches ranging from genetically enhancing human astronauts to modifying the environments of planets to make them hospitable have been proposed as methods. This paper takes a look at (...) a critique of human bioenhancement proposed by Mirko Garasic who argues that the bioenhancement of human astronauts is not only functional but necessary and thus morally permissible. However, he further claims that the bioethical arguments proposed for the context of space do not apply to the context of Earth. This paper forwards three arguments for how Garasic’s views are philosophically dubious: (1) when he examines our responsibility towards future generations he refers to a moral principle (which we will call the principle of mere survival) which, besides being vague, is not morally acceptable; (2) the idea that human bioenhancement is not natural is not only debatable but morally irrelevant; and (3) it is not true that the situations that may arise in space travel cannot occur on Earth. We conclude that not only is the (bio)enhancement of humans on Earth permissible but perhaps even necessary in certain circumstances. (shrink)

Following its publication in Germany in 1963, Otto Friedrich Bollnow's Human Space quickly became essential reading within a cross-disciplinary field of subject areas including architecture, anthropology, and philosophy. In this first English translation, Bollnow conceives the human experience of space not merely as a philosophical problem but also as an extension of his research into psychology, human behavior, and the conventional domains of architecture: living in a building, in an apartment, in a house. Human Space is a (...) remarkable investigation of space as we experience it, by a man many consider to be the father of spatial and architectural anthropology. This lush hardcover edition includes an afterword by Joseph Kohlmaier that situates the work in the context of philosophical and architectural discussion. (shrink)

Achieving space situational awareness requires, at a minimum, the identification, characterization, and tracking of space objects. Leveraging the resultant space object data for purposes such as hostile threat assessment, object identification, and conjunction assessment presents major challenges. This is in part because in characterizing space objects we reference a variety of identifiers, components, subsystems, capabilities, vulnerabilities, origins, missions, orbital elements, patterns of life, operational processes, operational statuses, and so forth, which tend to be defined in highly (...) heterogeneous and sometimes inconsistent ways. The Space Domain Ontologies are designed to provide a consensus-based realist framework for formulating such characterizations in a way that is both consistent and computable. Space object data are aligned with classes and relations in a suite of ontologies built around the existing Space Object Ontology. They are stored in a dynamically updated Resource Description Framework triple store, which can be queried to support space situational awareness and the needs of spacecraft operators and analysts. This paper provides an overview of the Space Domain Ontologies and their development and use. It presents the motivation for and advantages of the Space Domain Ontologies, including the benefits they provide for enhancing and maintaining long-term space situational awareness. (shrink)

Objective. Conceptualization of the definition of space as a semantic unit of language consciousness. -/- Materials & Methods. A structural-ontological approach is used in the work, the methodology of which has been tested and applied in order to analyze the subject matter area of psychology, psycholinguistics and other social sciences, as well as in interdisciplinary studies of complex systems. Mathematical representations of space as a set of parallel series of events (Alexandrov) were used as the initial theoretical basis (...) of the structural-ontological analysis. In this case, understanding of an event was considered in the context of the definition adopted in computer science – a change in the object properties registered by the observer. -/- Results. The negative nature of space realizes itself in the subject-object structure, the components interaction of which is characterized by a change – a key property of the system under study. Observer’s registration of changes is accompanied by spatial focusing (situational concretization of the field of changes) and relating of its results with the field of potentially distinguishable changes (subjective knowledge about «changing world»). The indicated correlation performs the function of space identification in terms of recognizing its properties and their subjective significance, depending on the features of the observer`s motivational sphere. As a result, the correction of the actual affective dynamics of the observer is carried out, which structures the current perception of space according to principle of the semantic fractal. Fractalization is a formation of such a subjective perception of space, which supposes the establishment of semantic accordance between the situational field of changes, on the one hand, and the worldview, as well as the motivational characteristics of the observer, on the other. -/- Conclusions. Performed structural-ontological analysis of the system formed by the interaction of the perceptual function of the psyche and the semantic field of the language made it possible to conceptualize the space as a field of changes potentially distinguishable by the observer, structurally organized according to the principle of the semantic fractal. The compositional features of the fractalization process consist in fact that the semantic fractal of space is relevant to the product of the difference between the situational field of changes and the field of potentially distinguishable changes, adjusted by the current configuration of the observer`s value-needs hierarchy and reduced by his actual affective dynamics. (shrink)

This paper provides a method for characterizing space events using the framework of conceptual spaces. We focus specifically on estimating and ranking the likelihood of collisions between space objects. The objective is to design an approach for anticipatory decision support for space operators who can take preventive actions on the basis of assessments of relative risk. To make this possible our approach draws on the fusion of both hard and soft data within a single decision support framework. (...) Contextual data is also taken into account, for example data about space weather effects, by drawing on the Space Domain Ontologies, a large system of ontologies designed to support all aspects of space situational awareness. The framework is coupled with a mathematical programming scheme that frames a mathematically optimal approach for decision support, providing a quantitative basis for ranking potential for collision across multiple satellite pairs. The goal is to provide the broadest possible information foundation for critical assessments of collision likelihood. (shrink)

Russian abstract: В данном сборнике статей раскрывается формирование структурно-онтологического представления о таком явлении, как городское пространство. Наряду с соответствующей концептуализацией, также представлено и объяснено определение городского сообщества. Обоснована логика классификации городских сообществ. А также проанализированы факторы, обуславливающие их устойчивость. -/- English abstract: This collection of articles reveals the formation of a structural-ontological concept of such a phenomenon as urban space. Along with relevant conceptualization, the definition of an urban community is also presented and explained. The logic of classification of (...) urban communities is substantiated. And also analyzed the factors that determine their stability. (shrink)

In this book John Campbell shows that the general structural features of human thought can be seen as having their source in the distinctive ways in which we...

Presenting the history of space-time physics, from Newton to Einstein, as a philosophical development DiSalle reflects our increasing understanding of the connections between ideas of space and time and our physical knowledge. He suggests that philosophy's greatest impact on physics has come about, less by the influence of philosophical hypotheses, than by the philosophical analysis of concepts of space, time and motion, and the roles they play in our assumptions about physical objects and physical measurements. This way (...) of thinking leads to interpretations of the work of Newton and Einstein and the connections between them. It also offers ways of looking at old questions about a priori knowledge, the physical interpretation of mathematics, and the nature of conceptual change. Understanding Space-Time will interest readers in philosophy, history and philosophy of science, and physics, as well as readers interested in the relations between physics and philosophy. (shrink)

Modern cosmology treats space and time, or rather space-time, as concrete particulars. The General Theory of Relativity combines the distribution of matter and energy with the curvature of space-time. Here space-time appears as a concrete entity which affects matter and energy and is affected by the things in it. I question the idea that space-time is a concrete existing entity which both substantivalism and reductive relationism maintain. Instead I propose an alternative view, which may be (...) called non-reductive relationism, by arguing that space and time are abstract entities based on extension and changes. (shrink)

‘Space does not exist fundamentally: it emerges from a more fundamental non-spatial structure.’ This intriguing claim appears in various research programs in contemporary physics. Philosophers of physics tend to believe that this claim entails either that spacetime does not exist, or that it is derivatively real. In this article, I introduce and defend a third metaphysical interpretation of the claim: reductionism about space. I argue that, as a result, there is no need to subscribe to fundamentality, layers of (...) reality and emergence in order to analyse the constitution of space by non-spatial entities. It follows that space constitution, if borne out, does not provide empirical evidence in favour of a stratified, Aristotelian in spirit, metaphysics. The view will be described in relation to two particular research programs in contemporary physics: wave function realism and loop quantum gravity. (shrink)

Branching space-time is a simple blend of relativity and indeterminism. Postulates and definitions rigorously describe the causal order relation between possible point events. The key postulate is a version of everything has a causal origin; key defined terms include history and choice point. Some elementary but helpful facts are proved. Application is made to the status of causal contemporaries of indeterministic events, to how splitting of histories happens, to indeterminism without choice, and to Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen distant correlations.

_Intervening Spaces_ examines interconnectedness between bodies, time and space. It explores the oscillating and at times political impact that occurs when bodies and space engage in non-conventional ways. Temporal and spatial dichotomies are disrupted—revealing new ways of inhabiting space.

In this book, Lawrence Sklar demonstrates the interdependence of science and philosophy by examining a number of crucial problems on the nature of space and ...

What is the relationship between space and time in the human mind? Studies in adults show an asymmetric relationship between mental representations of these basic dimensions of experience: Representations of time depend on space more than representations of space depend on time. Here we investigated the relationship between space and time in the developing mind. Native Greek‐speaking children watched movies of two animals traveling along parallel paths for different distances or durations and judged the spatial and (...) temporal aspects of these events (e.g., Which animal went for a longer distance, or a longer time?). Results showed a reliable cross‐dimensional asymmetry. For the same stimuli, spatial information influenced temporal judgments more than temporal information influenced spatial judgments. This pattern was robust to variations in the age of the participants and the type of linguistic framing used to elicit responses. This finding demonstrates a continuity between space‐time representations in children and adults, and informs theories of analog magnitude representation. (shrink)

It is argued that physics must eventually expand to accommodate mind and consciousness but that this will require a new paradigm. The paradigm required will impinge on two problems on the borders of physics and philosophy: the relationship between physical space and perceptual space and the nature of the passage of time. It is argued that the resolution of both these problems may involve a 5-dimensional model, with the 5th dimension being associated with mental time, and this proposal (...) may relate to recent developments in brane cosmology. A description of consciousness must also entail a proper understanding of the specious present, the minimum timescale of conscious experience, this possibly being associated with a compactified extra dimension. There could even be a hierarchy of levels of consciousness, associated with a hierarchy of extra dimensions. (shrink)

Maurice Blanchot, the eminent literary and cultural critic, has had a vast influence on contemporary French writers—among them Jean Paul Sartre and Jacques Derrida. From the 1930s through the present day, his writings have been shaping the international literary consciousness. The Space of Literature , first published in France in 1955, is central to the development of Blanchot's thought. In it he reflects on literature and the unique demand it makes upon our attention. Thus he explores the process of (...) reading as well as the nature of artistic creativity, all the while considering the relation of the literary work to time, to history, and to death. This book consists not so much in the application of a critical method or the demonstration of a theory of literature as in a patiently deliberate meditation upon the literary experience, informed most notably by studies of Mallarme;, Kafka, Rilke, and Hölderlin. Blanchot's discussions of those writers are among the finest in any language. (shrink)

This paper presents some reflections about an approach in work psychology: the Activity Clinic. After a brief introduction to the conceptual background of the “Activity Clinic”, it covers three deeply interconnected themes. The first concerns the meaning attributed to the development of the affects present in the work situation under analysis; the second discusses the reasons for the conflicts that are ultimately due to these affects; the third considers how a method of co-analysis of the activity can lead towards transformation (...) of those conflicts. Our reflections refer to the process engendered by this methodological approach as one of “transferential activity”. The paper explains this process by empirically describing the “transport” of affects involved in the conflicts. The personal interpretation of the cause of problems gives way to the understanding that they are due to organizational dysfunction rather than to individual personalities. Measures can then be taken to break the deadlocks experienced both at the personal and collective level. (shrink)

The arguments in this book are informed at once by the moral-political implications of how knowledge is produced and circulated and by issues of gendered subjectivity. In their critical dimension, these lucid essays engage with the incapacity of the philosophical mainstream's dominant epistemologies to offer regulative principles that guide people in the epistemic projects that figure centrally in their lives. In its constructive dimension, ____Rhetorical__ ____Spaces__ focuses on developing productive, case-by-case analyses of knowing other people in situations where social-political inequalities (...) create asymmetrical patterns of epistemic power and privilege. (shrink)

Thinking Space is ideal reading for those looking to learn about the Ospatial turn1 in social and cultural theory. As theorists have begun using using geographical concepts and metaphors to think about the complex and differentiated world this book examines the way they use spatial ideas, what role these ideas play in their thinking and what this means for how we think about theory and space. Among the writers discussed are: Simmel, Bakhtin, Deleuze, Cixous, Lefebvre, Lacan, Bourdieu, Foucault (...) and Fanon. (shrink)

We live today within a system in which state and corporate power aim to render space flat, transparent, and uniform, for only then can it be truly controlled. The gaze of power and the commodity form are capable of infiltrating even the darkest of corners, and often, we invite them into our most private spaces. We do so as a matter of convenience, but also to placate ourselves and cope with the alienation inherent in our everyday lives. The resulting (...) dominant space can best be termed totalitarian. It is space stripped of uniqueness, deprived of the “spatial aura” necessary for authentic experience. In Totalitarian Space and the Destruction of Aura, Saladdin Ahmed sets out to help us grasp what has been lost before no trace remains. He draws attention to that which we might prefer not to see, but despite the bleakness of this indictment of reality, the book also offers a message of hope. Namely, it is only once we comprehend the magnitude of the threat to our spatial experience and our own complicity in sustaining this system that we can begin to resist the totalizing forces at work. (shrink)

I motivate and defend a previously underdeveloped functionalist account of the metaphysics of color, a view that I call ‘quality-space functionalism’ about color. Although other theorists have proposed varieties of color functionalism, this view differs from such accounts insofar as it identifies and individuates colors by their relative locations within a particular kind of so-called ‘quality space’ that reflects creatures’ capacities to discriminate visually among stimuli. My arguments for this view of color are abductive: I propose that quality- (...) class='Hi'>space functionalism best captures our commonsense conception of color, fits with many experimental findings, coheres with the phenomenology of color experience, and avoids many issues for standard theories of color such as color physicalism and color relationalism. (shrink)

Quality-space theory (QST) explains the nature of the mental qualities distinctive of perceptual states by appeal to their role in perceiving. QST is typically described in terms of the mental qualities that pertain to color. Here we apply QST to the olfactory modalities. Olfaction is in various respects more complex than vision, and so provides a useful test case for QST. To determine whether QST can deal with the challenges olfaction presents, we show how a quality space (QS) (...) could be constructed relying on olfactory perceptible properties and the olfactory mental qualities then defined by appeal to that QS of olfactory perceptible properties. We also consider how to delimit the olfactory QS from other modalities. We further apply QST to the role that experience plays in refining our olfactory discriminative abilities and the occurrence of olfactory mental qualities in non-conscious olfactory states. QST is shown to be fully applicable to and useful for understanding the complex domain of olfaction. (shrink)

Space Gender Knowledge is an innovative and comprehensive introduction to the geographies of gender and the gendered nature of spatial relations. It examines the major issues raised by women's movements and academic feminism, and outlines the main shifts in feminist geographical work, from the geography of women to the impact of post-structuralism. In making their selection, the editors have drawn on a wide range of interdisciplinary material, ranging across spatial scales from the body to the globe. The book presents (...) influential arguments for the importance of the intersection between space and gender. Looking both at geography and beyond the discipline, it explores the gendered construction of space and the spatial construction of gender. Divided into a number of conceptual sections, each prefaced by an editorial introduction, this reader includes extracts from both landmark texts and less well-known works, making it an indispensable introduction to this dynamic field of study. (shrink)

A central concept for information retrieval is that of similarity. Although an information retrieval system is expected to return a set of documents most relevant to the query word(s), it is often described as returning a set of documents most similar to the query. The authors argue that in order to reason with similarity we need to model the concept of discriminating power. They offer a simple topological notion called resolution space that provides a rich mathematical framework for reasoning (...) with limited discriminating power, avoiding the vagueness paradox. (shrink)