Ontologies of Nature

Ontologies of Nature PDF Author: Gerard Kuperus
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319662368
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
This volume contains essays that offer both historical and contemporary views of nature, as seen through a hermeneutic, deconstructive, and phenomenological lens. It reaches back to Ancient Greek conceptions of physis in Homer and Empedocles, encompasses 13th century Zen master Dōgen, and extends to include 21st Century Continental Thought. By providing ontologies of nature from the perspective of the history of philosophy and of contemporary philosophy alike, the book shows that such perspectives need to be seen in dialogue with each other in order to offer a deeper and more comprehensive philosophy of nature. The value of the historical accounts discussed lies in discerning the conceptual problems that contribute to the dominant thinking underpinning our ecological predicament, as well as in providing helpful resources for thinking innovatively through current problems, thus recasting the past to allow for a future yet to be imagined. The book also discusses contemporary continental thinkers who are more critically aware of the dominant anthropocentric and instrumental view of nature, and who provide substantial guidance for a sensible, innovative “ontology of nature” suited for an ecology of the future. Overall, the ontologies of nature discerned in this volume are not merely of theoretical interest, but strategically serve to suspend anthropocentrism and spark ethical and political reorientation in the context of our current ecological predicament.

Ontologies of Nature

Ontologies of Nature PDF Author: Gerard Kuperus
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319662368
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume contains essays that offer both historical and contemporary views of nature, as seen through a hermeneutic, deconstructive, and phenomenological lens. It reaches back to Ancient Greek conceptions of physis in Homer and Empedocles, encompasses 13th century Zen master Dōgen, and extends to include 21st Century Continental Thought. By providing ontologies of nature from the perspective of the history of philosophy and of contemporary philosophy alike, the book shows that such perspectives need to be seen in dialogue with each other in order to offer a deeper and more comprehensive philosophy of nature. The value of the historical accounts discussed lies in discerning the conceptual problems that contribute to the dominant thinking underpinning our ecological predicament, as well as in providing helpful resources for thinking innovatively through current problems, thus recasting the past to allow for a future yet to be imagined. The book also discusses contemporary continental thinkers who are more critically aware of the dominant anthropocentric and instrumental view of nature, and who provide substantial guidance for a sensible, innovative “ontology of nature” suited for an ecology of the future. Overall, the ontologies of nature discerned in this volume are not merely of theoretical interest, but strategically serve to suspend anthropocentrism and spark ethical and political reorientation in the context of our current ecological predicament.

Narrating Nature

Narrating Nature PDF Author: Mara Jill Goldman
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816539677
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
The current environmental crises demand that we revisit dominant approaches for understanding nature-society relations. Narrating Nature brings together various ways of knowing nature from differently situated Maasai and conservation practitioners and scientists into lively debate. It speaks to the growing movement within the academy and beyond on decolonizing knowledge about and relationships with nature, and debates within the social sciences on how to work across epistemologies and ontologies. It also speaks to a growing need within conservation studies to find ways to manage nature with people. This book employs different storytelling practices, including a traditional Maasai oral meeting—the enkiguena—to decenter conventional scientific ways of communicating about, knowing, and managing nature. Author Mara J. Goldman draws on more than two decades of deep ethnographic and ecological engagements in the semi-arid rangelands of East Africa—in landscapes inhabited by pastoral and agropastoral Maasai people and heavily utilized by wildlife. These iconic landscapes have continuously been subjected to boundary drawing practices by outsiders, separating out places for people (villages) from places for nature (protected areas). Narrating Nature follows the resulting boundary crossings that regularly occur—of people, wildlife, and knowledge—to expose them not as transgressions but as opportunities to complicate the categories themselves and create ontological openings for knowing and being with nature otherwise. Narrating Nature opens up dialogue that counters traditional conservation narratives by providing space for local Maasai inhabitants to share their ways of knowing and being with nature. It moves beyond standard community conservation narratives that see local people as beneficiaries or contributors to conservation, to demonstrate how they are essential knowledgeable members of the conservation landscape itself.

Ontological Investigations

Ontological Investigations PDF Author: Ingvar Johansson
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110329867
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
This volume is devoted to problems within analytic metaphysics. It defends an ontology and theory of categories inspired by Aristotle, but revised in such a way as to be compatible with modern science. The ontology of both natural and social reality is addressed, starting out from the view that universals exist but only in the spatiotemporal world (immanent realism). In attempting to bring Aristotle's ontology up-to-date, the author relies very much on the thinking of Edmund Husserl, conceiving the cement of the universe as Husserlian relations of existential dependence and regarding intentionality as a non-reducible category in the ontology of mind. The work is thoroughly realistic in spirit, but large parts of it should nonetheless be of interest to conceptualists and nominalists, too.

Beyond Nature and Culture

Beyond Nature and Culture PDF Author: Philippe Descola
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022614500X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 486

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Book Description
“Gives to anthropological reflection a new starting point and will become the compulsory reference for all our debates in the years to come.” —Claude Lévi-Strauss, on the French edition Beyond Nature and Culture has been a major influence in European intellectual life since its French publication in 2005. Here, finally, it is brought to English-language readers. At its heart is a question central to both anthropology and philosophy: what is the relationship between nature and culture? Culture—as a collective human making, of art, language, and so forth—is often seen as essentially different from nature, which is portrayed as a collective of the nonhuman world, of plants, animals, geology, and natural forces. Philippe Descola shows this essential difference to be not only a Western notion, but also a very recent one. Drawing on ethnographic examples from around the world and theoretical understandings from cognitive science, structural analysis, and phenomenology, he formulates a sophisticated new framework, the “four ontologies” —animism, totemism, naturalism, and analogism—to account for all the ways we relate ourselves to nature. By thinking beyond nature and culture as a simple dichotomy, Descola offers a fundamental reformulation by which anthropologists and philosophers can see the world afresh. “A compelling and original account of where the nature-culture binary has come from, where it might go—and what we might imagine in its place.” —Somatosphere “The most important book coming from French anthropology since Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Anthropologie Structurale.” —Bruno Latour, author of An Inquiry into Modes of Existence “Descola’s challenging new worldview should be of special interest to a wide range of scientific and academic disciplines from anthropology to zoology . . . Highly recommended.” —Choice

Idea and Ontology

Idea and Ontology PDF Author: Marc A. Hight
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271047658
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
"A wide-ranging study of the 'way of ideas' and its metaphysics, culminating in a bold reinterpretation of Berkeley."

Ontologies:

Ontologies: PDF Author: Dieter Fensel
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3662043963
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
Ontologies have been developed and investigated for quite a while now in artificial intelligence and natural language processing to facilitate knowledge sharing and reuse. More recently, the notion of ontologies has attracted attention from fields such as intelligent information integration, cooperative information systems, information retrieval, electronic commerce, and knowledge management. The author systematically introduces the notion of ontologies to the non-expert reader and demonstrates in detail how to apply this conceptual framework for improved intranet retrieval of corporate information and knowledge and for enhanced Internet-based electronic commerce. In the second part of the book, the author presents a more technical view on emerging Web standards, like XML, RDF, XSL-T, or XQL, allowing for structural and semantic modeling and description of data and information.

Handbook on Ontologies

Handbook on Ontologies PDF Author: Steffen Staab
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3540247505
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 661

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Book Description
An ontology is a description (like a formal specification of a program) of concepts and relationships that can exist for an agent or a community of agents. The concept is important for the purpose of enabling knowledge sharing and reuse. The Handbook on Ontologies provides a comprehensive overview of the current status and future prospectives of the field of ontologies. The handbook demonstrates standards that have been created recently, it surveys methods that have been developed and it shows how to bring both into practice of ontology infrastructures and applications that are the best of their kind.

Ontologies

Ontologies PDF Author: Raj Sharman
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9781489977304
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 952

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Book Description
Ontology, or the nature of being, has been a focal area of study in the philosophical disciplines for a long time. Interpreted simply, the term ontology refers to the question what kinds of things exist? to a philosopher, while a computer scientist grapples with the question what kinds of things should we capture and represent? Together, research on the two questions yield a broad framework for the analysis of a discourse universe, its representation in some abstract form and the development of organizations and systems within the universe. The philosophical perspective on ontology provides a description of the essential properties and relations of all beings in the universe, while this notion has been expanded as well as specialized in the fields of computer science and artificial intelligence. The AI/CS communities now use this notion to refer to not one but multiple ontologies. In the AI/CS perspective, an ontology refers to the specification of knowledge about entities, and their relationships and interactions in a bounded universe of discourse only. As a result, a number of bounded-universe ontologies have been created over the last decade. These include the Chemicals ontology in the chemistry area, the TOVE and Enterprise ontologies for enterprise modeling, the REA ontology in the accounting area, organizational knowledge ontology in the knowledge management area, an ontology of air campaign planning in the defense area, and the GALEN ontology in the medical informatics area."

An Exploration of Prehistoric Ontologies in the Bering Strait Region

An Exploration of Prehistoric Ontologies in the Bering Strait Region PDF Author: Feng Qu
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527564320
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
This book introduces readers to the belief and symbolism present in the prehistoric art of the Bering Strait region. For about a century, the archaeology of this area has mainly focused on material, economic, and technological perspectives, leaving studies of prehistoric spirituality, religion, and cosmology to be under-conceptualized. This text questions the nature of materiality, and the relationship between it and spirituality. It employs an analytical and methodological approach located within the frameworks of practice theory and animist ontologies to open up thought-provoking avenues for interpretive possibility. This book also provides new knowledge about the prehistoric material culture of ancient Inuit people, and offers an assessment of contemporary archaeological theories, such as cognitive archaeology, structural archaeology, and shamanism theory, in order to examine the reliability of these theories in the studies of prehistoric art. According to the ontological trend which has constituted a powerful challenge to traditional nature/culture and body/mind dichotomies, this book reconsiders prehistoric Inuit cultures, providing an analysis of therianthropic motifs on prehistoric ivories to explore potential shamanism within ontological and cosmological structures.

Andean Ontologies

Andean Ontologies PDF Author: María Cecilia Lozada
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813057140
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
Andean Ontologies is a fascinating interdisciplinary investigation of how ancient Andean people understood their world and the nature of being. Exploring pre-Hispanic ideas of time, space, and the human body, these essays highlight a range of beliefs across the region’s different cultures, emphasizing the relational aspects of identity in Andean worldviews. Studies included here show that Andeans physically interacted with their pasts through recurring ceremonies in their ritual calendar and that Andean bodies were believed to be changeable entities with the ability to interact with nonhuman and spiritual worlds. A survey of rock art describes Andeans’ changing relationships with places and things over time. Archaeological and ethnographic evidence reveals head hair was believed to be a conduit for the flow of spiritual power, and bioarchaeological remains offer evidence of Andean perceptions of age and wellness. This volume breaks new ground by bringing together an array of renowned specialists including anthropologists, bioarchaeologists, historians, linguists, ethnohistorians, and art historians to evaluate ancient Amerindian ideologies through different interpretive lenses. Many are local researchers from South American countries such as Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina, and this volume makes their work available to North American readers for the first time. Their essays are highly contextualized according to the territories and time periods studied. Instead of taking an external, outside-in approach, they prioritize internal and localized views that incorporate insights from today’s indigenous societies. This cutting-edge collection demonstrates the value of a multifaceted, holistic, inside-out approach to studying the pre-Columbian world. Contributors: Catherine J. Allen | Richard Lunniss | Matthew Sayre | Nicco La Mattina | Luis Muro | Luis Jaime Castillo | Elsa Tomasto | Giles Spence-Morrow | Edward Swenson | Mary Glowacki | Andres Laguens | Bruce Mannheim | Juan Villanueva | Andrés Troncoso