Ontological Space Research Articles

Exploring the transition: biology, technology, and epistemic activities

By focusing on biorobotics, this article explores the epistemological foundations necessary to support the transition from biological models to technological artifacts. To address this transition, I analyze the position of the German philosopher Thomas Fuchs, who represents one possible approach to the problem of the relationship between bio-inspired technology and biology. While Fuchs defends the idea of a unique ontological space for humans, this article contends that his categorical distinctions face challenges in establishing a robust epistemic foundation necessary to ground the transition from biology to technology. After identifying at least three interwoven reasons for rejecting Fuchs’ epistemic foundation, I ask how, through what methods, and by means of which practices the newly bio-inspired object is accessed and shaped. Expanding on philosophy of science and technology in practice, I argue that the plurality of answers to this question provides a possible epistemological foundation within the different frameworks of practices that produce the bio-inspired object. In addressing the potential epistemological foundation for pluralistically grounding the transition from biological models to technological ones, my approach helps us: (i) concretize and examine the relationship between biological and technological models, and (ii) investigate the features and validity of bio-inspired objects, effectively offering a more concrete and pluralistic picture of what bio-inspired sciences and technologies are and what they can (or cannot) do.

On the Ontotheology of Nature

ABSTRACT This article presents a study of the ontotheology of nature, a philosophical and theological approach that synthesizes ideas from ontotheology and the philosophy of nature. The ontotheology of nature is a secular and generalist program that integrates science, philosophy, and formal theology, particularly metaphysics, while also critically engaging with and transcending these disciplines by examining essential and foundational ontological concepts at the intersection of natural science and the philosophy of nature. Specifically, we focus on the relationship between the living organism and biology on the one hand, and the ontology of space, time, and assemblage on the other.

Making Waves: The Role of Indigenous Water Beings in Debates about Human and Non‐Human Rights

ABSTRACTRejecting nature‐culture dualism, contemporary anthropology recognises the mutually constitutive processes that create shared human and non‐human lifeworlds. Such recognition owes much to ethnographic engagement with diverse indigenous cosmologies many of which have, for millennia, upheld ideas about indivisible worlds in which all living kinds occupy a shared ontological space and non‐human species and environments are approached respectfully, with expectations of reciprocity and partnership. As many societies confront the global chaos caused by the anthropocentric prioritisation of human interests, anthropologists and indigenous communities are therefore well placed to articulate alternative models in which the non‐human domain is dealt with more equitably and inclusively. This paper is located comparatively in long‐term ethnographic research with indigenous communities in Australia, alongside the Mitchell River in North Queensland and the Brisbane River in South Queensland. It draws more specifically on involvement in legal claims for water rights by Māori iwis in New Zealand; in land claims by the Kunjen language group in Cape York; and in a recent ‘sea country’ case brought against a major multi‐national by the Tiwi Islanders in Australia's Northern Territory. It also makes use of a major comparative study of water beings in diverse cultural and historical contexts, and considers the central importance of water beings such as Māori taniwha and the Australian Rainbow Serpent in such legal conflicts, and in broader debates about human and non‐human rights. Like other water deities around the world, these beings personify the generative (and potentially punitive) powers of water and its co‐creative role in shaping human and non‐human lives. They are resurfacing today with an important representational role in contemporary conflicts over land and water.

Modern Architectures of Intelligent Tutoring Systems Based on Integrated Expert Systems: Features of the Approach to the Automated Formation of the Ontological Space of Knowledge and Skills of Students

Modern Architectures of Intelligent Tutoring Systems Based on Integrated Expert Systems: Features of the Approach to the Automated Formation of the Ontological Space of Knowledge and Skills of Students

Living in and working through the wake: A Black undocumented student's study abroad experience

AbstractUsing Sharpe's (2016) wake work theory, this paper highlights how one Black undocumented student used a study abroad experience to negotiate his dis/comfort and take up ontological space a liminal space. I argue that choosing to study abroad while risking uncertain access back in the United States is wake work. Escaping the wake, albeit short, was an intentional move to resist his liminal space, given his Blackness and immigration status. Findings reveal wake work occurred through (1) Movement: The beginning, (2) The escape, and (3) The return: Re‐entering the wake.Practical Takeaways Study abroad programs should assess how they are being inclusive in engaging undocumented students about these programs and identify successful practices and approaches to support those interested. Universities should partner with schools and independent organizations that provide study abroad opportunities for undocumented students. For example, the California‐Mexico Studies provides three academic programs for undocumented students 21 years and older to study abroad for 4 weeks in Mexico. Because DACA is a renewable program under the Obama‐era, no new students can apply for DACA which means more students entering higher education will be undocumented without DACA. As we enter a post DACA era, universities and study abroad programs will need to create and implement global learning programs and opportunities for undocumented students. Scholars working with, and alongside undocumented students should use more asset‐based theories and methodologies to highlight the experiences of Black undocumented students in higher education (see Santa‐Ramirez, 2021, 2022; Shelton & Thompson, 2023).

Tim Ingold and Object-Oriented Anthropology

Tim Ingold, while extending the radical undertaking of vitalism, with its Nietzschean matrix, puts the decentering undertaken by this philosophical tradition on a more solid foundation, opening up a new space of interobjective relations. Instead of an epistemic plunge into human categories, the goal is to move towards a broader ontological space, including other sites of meaning, such as chairs, spirits, animals, baskets, and many others. Unlike more classical anthropology, with its well-delimited Anthropos as an inevitable transcendental horizon, Ingold suggests a world where humans are not protagonists, but rather provisional negotiators within a large mesh of subjectless experiences. The model proposed in this essay distances itself from the plane of (neo)-Kantian speculation, converting its contours into something less orthodox by making room for a possible Object-Oriented Anthropology (O.O.A).

Love Letter to Decorator Crabs

Love Letter to Decorator Crabs

Towards a post-foundational geography: Spaces of negativity, contingency, and antagonism

The relation between politics, ontology, and space remains one of the most contested concerns in human geography, often leading to a dismissal of ontology in favor of the politicization of space. In contrast, this article mobilizes post-foundationalism to propose a political ontology of space. After reviewing geographers’ engagements with politics, post-politics and the political, the article demonstrates how a post-foundational geography radically uproots geographic understandings of political and socio-spatial realities. Grounded upon parameters of negativity, contingency, and antagonism, the article equips geographers to grapple with the crumbling foundations of an uncertain present, and unknown futures.

Psychology of Thinking in Search of Human Dimension: A Systemic and Anthropological View

The psychology of thinking needs to expand its subject area in order to match the psychology of human existence. The processual and complicated life world of a person is an integral ontological space of thinking, in the context of which problematization and mental search unfold. The author believes that life relations and existential mood should be regarded as operational, dynamic, subject-thematic, and stylistic aspects of thinking. Acts and events of thought of a holistically understood personality cannot be separated from their active thinking relationship with the Self and the world. The great dynamics of thinking includes transtemporal and chronotopic aspects of the ongoing mental experience and the topology of cognitive identity. New promising directions for further theoretical and experimental research in the psychology of thinking can be implemented in line with systemic anthropological psychology.

POV: A Home of Alterity

Challenging the idea of “home” as a safe refuge, or an enclosure of stability, this article explores ways in which home can be envisioned as an ontological space of becoming, where life is always risked. “POV: A Home of Alterity” is conceived within a deconstructivist theoretical framework and asks the question of how home can be perceived as an open text—a locus of oscillation between inside and outside—for the purpose of revealing home as an inherently traumatic “event,” which presupposes an openness to absolute alterity. To show the traces of otherness in one’s experience of being present (at home), it examines a photograph from Julia Borissova’s project DOM: Document Object Model and sets out to interrogate the concept of “home” through three relationships wherein it emerges: (1) between inside and outside, (2) between the I and the other, and (3) between the I and oneself. Consequently, this article seeks to define home as a representational space of one’s own alterity, where one surrenders to one’s non-coincidence with oneself and hence to experience itself, ultimately revealing that, in an aporetical way, home encrypts the very dislocation it “promises” to shield from.

Sensation(all) Ontology

It is the praxis of being a subject in the world which enables psychoanalysis to theorise subjectivity. Freud theorised subjectivity from the perspective of desires, those repressed unconscious forces which conflict with the subjects’ need to live in the world. The upshot of this conflict for the subject is trauma and for psychoanalysis such trauma provides a way into a remedy, a cure, the presumption of psychoanalysis being that through its method of transference, it does indeed possess the knowledge to pursue a remedy. Lacan offers a new interpretation of Freud by considering the subject as an ongoing ontological enigma in so far as subjective unconscious desire is not only (potentially) traumatic but necessarily (always) linguistic. How is this an ontological enigma? For Lacan the subject is first and foremost a speaking being engaged in an ongoing struggle to articulate unconscious desire. This is because, claims Lacan, we are born into language which not only pre-exists us but continues after death. In this way subjectivity is inescapably oriented to language as simultaneously intrinsic external to it. The unconscious is therefore a mixture of inside and outside, an enigmatic (pre)ontological space which Lacan calls extimacy. This essay seeks to explore Lacan’s orientation of the subject towards extimacy as the site of subjective conflict where, in its quest for the subject’s desire to know and handle the symptom, transference engages a new ontological dimension in which we can say that the extimate is structured like a sensation.

Digital methods as ‘experimental a priori’ – how to navigate vague empirical situations as an operationalist pragmatist

Digitalisation and computation presents us with a vague empirical world that unsettles established links between measurements and values. As more and more actors use digital media to produce data about aspects of the world they deem important, new possibilities for inscribing their lives emerge. The practical work with digital methods thus often involves the production of social visibilities that are misfits in the context of established data practices. In this paper I argue that this dissonance carries the distinct critical potential to design data experiments that (a) uses the act of operationalisation as an engine for creating intersubjective clarity about the meaning of existing concepts and (b) takes advantage of algorithmic techniques to provoke a reassessment of some of the core assumptions that shape the way we pose empirical problems are normally framed. Drawing on the work of Kant, Peirce, Dewey and C.I. Lewis I propose to think of this critical potential as the possibility to practice what I term 'experimental a priori' and I use qualitative vignettes from two years of data experiments with GEHL architects to illustrate what this entails in practice. Faced with the task of using traces from Facebook as an empirical source to produce a map of urban political diversity, the architects found themselves in a need to revisit inherited assumptions about the ontology of urban space and the way it can even be formulated as a problem of diversity. While I describe this as a form of obstructive data practice that is afforded by digital methods, I also argue that it cannot be realised without deliberate design interventions. I therefore end the paper by outlining five design principles that can productively guide collective work with digital methods. These principles contribute to recent work within digital STS on the recalibration of problem spaces and the design of data sprints. However, the concept of ‘experimental a priori’ can also serve as a philosophical foundation for knowledge production within computational humanities more broadly.

"A Tale of Two Cities": Cemetery Heterotopia and Spatial Relations in Lagos City.

What does cemetery teach us about the social world? How do spatial configurations of cemetery mirror urban social realities? In what ways can the understanding of spatial order of necropolis contribute to the episteme of spatial relations? In this paper, I juxtapose space practices in the cemetery with spatial relations and practices in the city of Lagos to frame an alternative way of imagining and writing about cityscapes and a new approach of thinking about social taxonomies such as gender, class, race, ethnicity and power. Following Foucault's theory of heterotopia and relational ontology of space this paper frames cemetery as a counter-site to the city. Drawing from oral interviews, participant observation and archival document, the paper argues that cemetery is a container that encloses different sites and sets of social relations as well as lived experiences.

To listen with decolonial ears: Hein Willemse, hidden histories, and the politics of disruptive intervention

In this article, we canvass some of the ideas around Hein Willemse’s focus on hidden histories, conscious oppositionality, and literature that falls outside the canon, which began to coalesce following contemporary calls for decolonial approaches in the (South) African academy. While the decolonial turn has focused attention on shared histories within Global South contexts, it is through Willemse’s postcolonial teachings that we first came to understand the importance and meaning of reclaiming the lost African ontological space. This article is, therefore, located in postcolonial and decolonial scholarship in the sense that it is not driven by a particular method but rather by questions that emerged from larger social contexts. We draw on Willemse’s visionary understanding of the importance of hidden histories and what it might mean to listen with postcolonial and/or decolonial ears. This, amongst other things, requires an acute awareness of history, heritage, and legacies both in society and in the academy. We incorporate a random selection of his work to unpack how his disruptive intervention serves to reformulate the idea of Afrikaans and Afrikaans literature in ways that are more inclusive of those silenced by the apartheid project, including Africa and the Global South at large.

Probabilities and Certainties Within a Causally Symmetric Model

This paper is concerned with the causally symmetric version of the familiar de Broglie–Bohm interpretation, this version allowing the spacelike nonlocality and the configuration space ontology of the original model to be avoided via the addition of retrocausality. Two different features of this alternative formulation are considered here. With regard to probabilities, it is shown that the model provides a derivation of the Born rule identical to that in Bohm’s original formulation. This derivation holds just as well for a many-particle, entangled state as for a single particle. With regard to “certainties”, the description of a particle’s spin is examined within the model and it is seen that a statistical description is no longer necessary once final boundary conditions are specified in addition to the usual initial state, with the particle then possessing a definite (but hidden) value for every spin component at intermediate times. These values are consistent with being the components of a single, underlying spin vector. The case of a two-particle entangled spin state is also examined and it is found that, due to the retrocausal aspect, each particle possesses its own definite spin during the entanglement, independent of the other particle. In formulating this picture, it is demonstrated how such a realistic model can preserve Lorentz invariance in the face of Bell’s theorem and avoid the need for a preferred reference frame.

Projective and other locative PPs in Greek

The distinction between projective and non-projective locative prepositions that has been proposed in the semantic literature (Zwarts & Winter 2000) is reflected in the syntax and morphology of Greek spatial expressions. Projective PPs in Greek are always complex, formed by a spatial “adverb” and the “light” preposition apo marking the ground DP. In non-projective PPs, which can be either simple or complex, the light preposition alternates between se (in locative and goal environments) and apo (in source and route environments). This is attributed to the different syntactic status of the “adverb”, which is shown to be a head in projectives, and an adjunct in non-projectives (cf. Theophanopoulou-Kontou 2000). The Greek data support an extended P projection analysis along the lines of Svenonius (2008; 2010) for projectives, which relates to their vector space ontology (Zwarts & Winter 2000). Non-projective expressions, on the other hand, are syntactically reduced.

How to Reflexively Decentre EU Foreign Policy: Dissonance and Contrapuntal Reconstruction in Migration, Religious and Neighbourhood Governance

AbstractThis article develops a timely new model for EU foreign policy by advancing the call for a ‘decentring agenda’, focused on the challenge of inclusive ‘reconstruction’. It does so by first staking out an ontological space at the intersection of empirical multiplexity and normative pluriversality. Within this space, it proposes an ethically informed methodological tool: the contrapuntal negotiation of dissonant perspectives on common governance challenges. It then suggests ways to reconstruct analytical and policy‐making processes and outcomes on the basis of mutuality and local empowerment. Using three scales of ‘contrapuntality’ (micro, meso and macro) to read key empirical sites at the intersection of the EU's internal and external policies (migration, religious and neighbourhood governance), it argues that by decentring in these and further arenas, the EU can seek to become a more reflexive global actor in sync with the ethical and practical demands of our multiplex world.

AI and Blackness: Toward Moving Beyond Bias and Representation

In this paper, we argue that AI ethics must move beyond the concepts of race-based representation and bias, and towards those that probe the deeper relations that impact how these systems are designed, developed, and deployed. Many recent discussions on ethical considerations of bias in AI systems have centered on racial bias. We contend that antiblackness in AI requires more of an examination of the ontological space that provides a foundation for the design, development, and deployment of AI systems. We examine what this contention means from the perspective of the sociocultural context in which AI systems are designed, developed, and deployed and focus on intersections with anti-Black racism (antiblackness). To bring these multiple perspectives together and show an example of antiblackness in the face of attempts at de-biasing, we discuss results from auditing an existing open-source semantic network (ConceptNet). We use this discussion to further contextualize antiblackness in design, development, and deployment of AI systems and suggest questions one may ask when attempting to combat antiblackness in AI systems.

DE/RE-STRATIFIKACIJE KAO MODERNE TEHNIKE RESTAURACIJE: FONDAZIONE QUERINI STAMPALIA (VENECIJA, 1963) KARLA SKARPE

The study investigates the theoretical approach toward the restoration of the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice by Carlo Scarpa, moving between phenomenology and ontology of space, time, and matter, theory of text/narrative, cultural analysis, and arts (architecture and painting). The main hypothesis of the study is that Carlo Scarpa, using the techniques of stratification, destratification, and restratification, transgresses the three classical principles of conservation/restoration: the principle of reversibility, universality and objective truth. In other words, stratification (and the accompanying de/re-stratification) for Carlo Scarpa is not only a method of constructing space interested only in scientific forms of knowledge and dis- covering the objective truth of a building, but, above all, an aesthetic and embodied procedure that takes the role of the sensory and bodily evocation of the tradition and culture of Venice in the present. From the classical restoration interest “for the object”, Carlo Scarpa moves on to the interest “for the subject” (users of the space of this building). In the historical, philo- sophical, and theoretical context, the study refers to the research of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Richard Murphy, Anne-Catrin Schultz, and Salvador Muñoz Viñas.

Cognitive Labyrinths of Social Creativity

The article raises the urgent problem of finding a relevant methodology of modern social cognition. This methodology should be able to adequately reflect modern complex, creative realities of our society which provides a qualitatively different education compared to the previous ones — innovative, super dynamic, polyphonic, paradoxical, and even absurd. We are on the “threshold” of an unknown social reality. The current course of social development categorically refutes the classical principles of social philosophy. It proves their failure in striving for absolutization, idealization, their lifelessness, and even inhumanity, as well as danger, leading to many ideological delusions, social tension, and social cataclysms. It became indisputable that the society of the XXI century needs qualitatively new paradigms of social cognition and understanding. This is a fundamentally different naturalness, a different sociality, a different “humanity.” The transformation of classical social philosophy into nonclassical and post-non-classical socio-philosophical discourses was undoubtedly caused by the need to search for new relevant cognitive paradigms geared towards understanding a person, whose existence in the face of modern civilizational challenges of heterogeneous sociality has become extremely tense and acutely problematic. The article attempts to substantiate a new humanitarian concept of a post-nonclassical socio-philosophical paradigm that focuses on the singularity of human existence, self-organizing within the boundaries of the polystructural social proliferation of modern society, in the cognitive and ontological space that legitimizes uncertainty. “Uncertainty” is a topical word and a concept of modern scientific and everyday culture, a fundamental characteristic of modernity. However, the talk is not about the inflation of truth but about the search for a new social research paradigm capable of reflecting the “turbulent” processes of modern society that eliminate classical social attitudes.