David Seamon
David Seamon (PhD, 1977, Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts USA) is Professor Emeritus of Environment-Behavior and Place Studies in the Department of Architecture at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas, USA. Trained in behavioral geography and environment-behavior research, he is interested in a phenomenological approach to place, architecture, environmental experience, and environmental design as placemaking. His books include DWELLING, PLACE AND ENVIRONMENT: TOWARDS A PHENOMENOLOGY OF PERSON AND WORLD (1985); DWELLING, SEEING, AND DESIGNING: TOWARD A PHENOMENOLOGICAL ECOLOGY (1993); GOETHE'S WAY OF SCIENCE: A PHENOMENOLOGY OF NATURE; and A GEOGRAPHY OF THE LIFEWORLD: MOVEMENT, REST AND ENCOUNTER (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979/Routledge Revival series, 2015). His most recent books are LIFE TAKES PLACE: PHENOMENOLOGY, LIFEWORLDS AND PLACE MAKING (2018) and PHENOMENOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON PLACE, LIFEWORLDS, AND LIVED EMPLACEMENT (2023). Both books are published by Routledge.
Supervisors: Anne Buttimer
Address: Architecture Dept
211 Seaton Hall
Kansas State Univ
Manhattan, KS 66506-2901 USA
Supervisors: Anne Buttimer
Address: Architecture Dept
211 Seaton Hall
Kansas State Univ
Manhattan, KS 66506-2901 USA
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In this chapter, I draw on French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy to explore environmental embodiment—the various lived ways, sensorily and motility-wise, that the body in its pre-reflective perceptual presence engages and synchronizes with the world at hand, especially its architectural and environmental aspects. First, I consider Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of perception, which he understands as the immediate givenness of the world founded in bodily sensibility. Second, I consider the architectural and environmental significance of what Merleau-Ponty calls body-subject—pre-reflective corporeal awareness expressed through action and typically in sync with and enmeshed in the physical world in which the action unfolds. I focus on the taken-for-granted sensibility of body-subject to manifest in extended ways over time and space. I ask how routine actions and behaviors of individuals coming together regularly can transform an environment into a place with a unique dynamic and character—a lived situation I term place ballet. For both perception and body-subject, I examine how qualities of the physical and designable world—for example, materiality, form, and spatiality—contribute to the lived body’s engagement with and actions in the world. I end by arguing that Merleau-Ponty offers an essential perspective for understanding the importance of place and lived emplacement in human life, but this perspective must be extended by considering how places change over time via generative processes that enliven or undermine places and lived emplacement.
Key words: body-subject, environmental embodiment, lived body, Merleau-Ponty, perception, phenomenology, place, place ballet
Longer entries begin with independent researcher Stephen Wood, who introduces the possibilities by which aquatic life may have lived connections to the dialectic of darkness and light via such phenomena as water depth and terrestrial location.
Next, Israeli architect Nili Portugali discusses her design efforts to implement the theory of wholeness developed by American architect and architectural theorist Christopher Alexander, whose ideas are featured regularly in EAP. Portugali’s real-world focus is her design of an apartment house in Tel Aviv, Israel (image, right). She considers how her envisioning and building this structure are grounded in and actualizes Alexander’s understanding of making environmental and place wholeness.
Philosopher Ingrid Leman Stefanovic provides a celebratory commentary on 35 years of EAP.
EAP editor David Seamon draws on philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s “hermeneutics of restoration of meaning” as one thematic means to identify EAP’s major aim over the years.
Geographer Edward Relph considers artificial intelligence as it might be critiqued via the thinking of philosopher Hannah Arendt and her insights on modernity’s invention of totalitarianism.
Philosopher Kenn Maly examines the phenomenon of water via the four qualities of substance, flow, non-duality, and freedom.
Chinese geographers Xu Huang and Zichuan Guo offer an ethnographic picture of Chengdu, China’s He-Ming Teahouse, opened in 1923.
Artist and writer Vicki King considers how the paintings of Canadian-American abstract-expressionist artist Agnes Martin “evoke sensual memories of New Mexico.”
A complete digital EAP archive (1990-2021) is available at: http://krex.k-state.edu/dspace/handle/2097/1522
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/7DJS2W75EZFYRMX4INGC/full?target=10.1080/02604027.2024.2330288
Note the considerably longer, original version of this article is available at:
https://www.academia.edu/38048231/Ways_of_Understanding_Wholeness_Place_Christopher_Alexander_and_Synergistic_Relationality_forthcoming_2019_conference_proceedings_
• Cognitive scientist Andrea Hiott reviews psychotherapist Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter with Things;
• Architect Susan Ingham reviews Lisa Heschong’s Visual Delight in Architecture;
• Anthropologist Jenny Quillien reviews architect Howard Davis’s edited collection of Early and Unpublished Writings of Christopher Alexander;
• EAP editor David Seamon reviews Christopher Alexander’s Production of Houses;
• Architect Howard Davis reports on a recent event celebrating Alexander’s Mexicali self-help housing experiment;
• Architect Gary Coates provides the new preface to his recently reprinted Resettling America, originally published in 1981;
• Philosopher Jeff Malpas offers remarks for a memoriam event devoted to the late Bob Mugerauer, a co-founder of EAP;
• Anthropologist Jenny Quillien introduces a phenomenological reformulation of the ideas of early-twentieth-century geographer and environmental determinist Ellen Churchill Semple.
You are welcome to forward the PDF to anyone you think might be interested. A complete digital EAP archive (1990-2022) is available at: http://krex.k-state.edu/dspace/handle/2097/1522.
David Seamon
Editor, Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology
Zoologist Stephen Wood examines jizz—the singular presence of a living being instantly recognizable without the involvement of conscious attention; his focus is the jizz of birds.
Geographer Edward Relph considers aspects of a phenomenology of climate change by examining how the phenomenon is understood and experienced via both everyday and extreme environmental situations and events.
Philosopher Robert Josef Kozljanič overviews the study of genius loci (sense of place), giving particular attention to recent phenomenological research on the topic, including the “New Phenomenology of philosopher Hermann Schmitz.
Artist and place researcher Victoria King recounts her Australian experiences with indigenous women of the Outback and their work in sand painting, giving particular attention to the work of Emily Kngwarreye (c. 1910–1996), an elderly woman artist from Utopia, an area of 16 small Aboriginal communities spread across 2,400 kilometers in Australia’s red, arid interior.
Portions of this essay were originally written for a longer “in memoriam” tribute for Jager and his work; see Seamon, 2016: https://www.academia.edu/22455083/Thinking_Longing_and_Nearness_In_Memoriam_Bernd_Jager_1931_2015_2016_
https://thesideview.co/journal/finding-the-center/
In this article, I highlight American architect Christopher Alexander’s concept of “center,” which offers one way to identify the crux of his work, whether thinking or designing. Most broadly, a center is any spatial concentration or organized focus of more intense pattern or activity—for example, an intricate carpet pattern, an elegant entryway, a handsome arcade, a gracious building, or an animated plaza full of users finding pleasure in the place. Whatever its specific nature and scale, a center is a region of concentrated physical and experiential order that provides for an intense spatial and lived relatedness among things, people, situations, and events. A center is “an organized zone of space … which, because of its internal coherence, and because of its relation to context … forms a local zone of relative centeredness with respect to the other parts of space." A pivotal question for Alexander is how an understanding of centers might help architects to conceive of and actualize vigorous places and environments that sustain thriving human life.
As you may know, humanistic geographer Yi-Fu Tuan died in August 2022, and this EAP is a special “in memoriam” issue in his honor. The issue includes tributes by philosopher Ingrid Leman Stefanovic and geographers Edward Relph, Stanley Brunn, and Xu Huang. We include excerpts from five of Tuan’s many articles, chapters, and books.
This winter/spring issue also includes one book review and three essays:
Cognitive scientist Andrea Hiott reviews psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist’s 2009 The Master and His Emisary.
Zoologist Stephen Wood considers the phenomenon of noticing the natural world and the question of how this directed awareness unfolds.
Anthropologist Jenny Quillien provides a first-person ethnography of her recent residence in Alaska.
Religious-studies scholar Harry Oldmeadow discusses the sacredness of deserts, a theme that complements his earlier EAP essay on the holiness of mountains.
A complete digital EAP archive (1990-2022) is available at: http://krex.k-state.edu/dspace/handle/2097/1522.
David Seamon
Editor, Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology
A complete digital EAP archive (1990-2022) is available at: http://krex.k-state.edu/dspace/handle/2097/1522.
Prominent in the 1970s and 1980s, humanistic geography referred to a wide-ranging body of research emphasizing the central role of human experience and meaning in understanding peoples' relationship with geographical environments. Realizing that human engagement with the geographical world is complex and multivalent, humanistic geographers drew on qualitative approaches like phenomenology and hermeneutics to describe and interpret human actions and understandings as they both sustain and are sustained by geographical aspects of human life such as space, place, region, landscape, and natural environments.
An “in memoriam" for environmental psychologist Robert Sommer, who died in February, 2021;
A “book note” on architect Giulia Foscari’s Elements of Venice (2014).
A “book note” on architect and planner Matthew Carmona’s 3rd edition of Public Places, Urban Spaces (2021), an overview of urban-design theories, concepts, and practices.
Environmental educator Michael Maser’s explication of a place-based education grounded in what he calls “self-in-place.”
Philosopher John Russon’s discussion of parallels between love of place and love of human beings.
Philosopher Jeff Malpas’ consideration of the relation between “spirit of time” and “spirit of place.”
Cartographer Luke Harvey’s efforts to draw on the example of London parks to develop graphic means for presenting aspects of place experience visually.
Please note: If you are using a Mac machine, the full PDF will not appear properly unless you download the PDF. For some reason, academia.edu does not fully accommodate Apple products. As a result, a good number of the graphics of the issue don't appear.
In this chapter, I draw on French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy to explore environmental embodiment—the various lived ways, sensorily and motility-wise, that the body in its pre-reflective perceptual presence engages and synchronizes with the world at hand, especially its architectural and environmental aspects. First, I consider Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of perception, which he understands as the immediate givenness of the world founded in bodily sensibility. Second, I consider the architectural and environmental significance of what Merleau-Ponty calls body-subject—pre-reflective corporeal awareness expressed through action and typically in sync with and enmeshed in the physical world in which the action unfolds. I focus on the taken-for-granted sensibility of body-subject to manifest in extended ways over time and space. I ask how routine actions and behaviors of individuals coming together regularly can transform an environment into a place with a unique dynamic and character—a lived situation I term place ballet. For both perception and body-subject, I examine how qualities of the physical and designable world—for example, materiality, form, and spatiality—contribute to the lived body’s engagement with and actions in the world. I end by arguing that Merleau-Ponty offers an essential perspective for understanding the importance of place and lived emplacement in human life, but this perspective must be extended by considering how places change over time via generative processes that enliven or undermine places and lived emplacement.
Key words: body-subject, environmental embodiment, lived body, Merleau-Ponty, perception, phenomenology, place, place ballet
Longer entries begin with independent researcher Stephen Wood, who introduces the possibilities by which aquatic life may have lived connections to the dialectic of darkness and light via such phenomena as water depth and terrestrial location.
Next, Israeli architect Nili Portugali discusses her design efforts to implement the theory of wholeness developed by American architect and architectural theorist Christopher Alexander, whose ideas are featured regularly in EAP. Portugali’s real-world focus is her design of an apartment house in Tel Aviv, Israel (image, right). She considers how her envisioning and building this structure are grounded in and actualizes Alexander’s understanding of making environmental and place wholeness.
Philosopher Ingrid Leman Stefanovic provides a celebratory commentary on 35 years of EAP.
EAP editor David Seamon draws on philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s “hermeneutics of restoration of meaning” as one thematic means to identify EAP’s major aim over the years.
Geographer Edward Relph considers artificial intelligence as it might be critiqued via the thinking of philosopher Hannah Arendt and her insights on modernity’s invention of totalitarianism.
Philosopher Kenn Maly examines the phenomenon of water via the four qualities of substance, flow, non-duality, and freedom.
Chinese geographers Xu Huang and Zichuan Guo offer an ethnographic picture of Chengdu, China’s He-Ming Teahouse, opened in 1923.
Artist and writer Vicki King considers how the paintings of Canadian-American abstract-expressionist artist Agnes Martin “evoke sensual memories of New Mexico.”
A complete digital EAP archive (1990-2021) is available at: http://krex.k-state.edu/dspace/handle/2097/1522
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/7DJS2W75EZFYRMX4INGC/full?target=10.1080/02604027.2024.2330288
Note the considerably longer, original version of this article is available at:
https://www.academia.edu/38048231/Ways_of_Understanding_Wholeness_Place_Christopher_Alexander_and_Synergistic_Relationality_forthcoming_2019_conference_proceedings_
• Cognitive scientist Andrea Hiott reviews psychotherapist Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter with Things;
• Architect Susan Ingham reviews Lisa Heschong’s Visual Delight in Architecture;
• Anthropologist Jenny Quillien reviews architect Howard Davis’s edited collection of Early and Unpublished Writings of Christopher Alexander;
• EAP editor David Seamon reviews Christopher Alexander’s Production of Houses;
• Architect Howard Davis reports on a recent event celebrating Alexander’s Mexicali self-help housing experiment;
• Architect Gary Coates provides the new preface to his recently reprinted Resettling America, originally published in 1981;
• Philosopher Jeff Malpas offers remarks for a memoriam event devoted to the late Bob Mugerauer, a co-founder of EAP;
• Anthropologist Jenny Quillien introduces a phenomenological reformulation of the ideas of early-twentieth-century geographer and environmental determinist Ellen Churchill Semple.
You are welcome to forward the PDF to anyone you think might be interested. A complete digital EAP archive (1990-2022) is available at: http://krex.k-state.edu/dspace/handle/2097/1522.
David Seamon
Editor, Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology
Zoologist Stephen Wood examines jizz—the singular presence of a living being instantly recognizable without the involvement of conscious attention; his focus is the jizz of birds.
Geographer Edward Relph considers aspects of a phenomenology of climate change by examining how the phenomenon is understood and experienced via both everyday and extreme environmental situations and events.
Philosopher Robert Josef Kozljanič overviews the study of genius loci (sense of place), giving particular attention to recent phenomenological research on the topic, including the “New Phenomenology of philosopher Hermann Schmitz.
Artist and place researcher Victoria King recounts her Australian experiences with indigenous women of the Outback and their work in sand painting, giving particular attention to the work of Emily Kngwarreye (c. 1910–1996), an elderly woman artist from Utopia, an area of 16 small Aboriginal communities spread across 2,400 kilometers in Australia’s red, arid interior.
Portions of this essay were originally written for a longer “in memoriam” tribute for Jager and his work; see Seamon, 2016: https://www.academia.edu/22455083/Thinking_Longing_and_Nearness_In_Memoriam_Bernd_Jager_1931_2015_2016_
https://thesideview.co/journal/finding-the-center/
In this article, I highlight American architect Christopher Alexander’s concept of “center,” which offers one way to identify the crux of his work, whether thinking or designing. Most broadly, a center is any spatial concentration or organized focus of more intense pattern or activity—for example, an intricate carpet pattern, an elegant entryway, a handsome arcade, a gracious building, or an animated plaza full of users finding pleasure in the place. Whatever its specific nature and scale, a center is a region of concentrated physical and experiential order that provides for an intense spatial and lived relatedness among things, people, situations, and events. A center is “an organized zone of space … which, because of its internal coherence, and because of its relation to context … forms a local zone of relative centeredness with respect to the other parts of space." A pivotal question for Alexander is how an understanding of centers might help architects to conceive of and actualize vigorous places and environments that sustain thriving human life.
As you may know, humanistic geographer Yi-Fu Tuan died in August 2022, and this EAP is a special “in memoriam” issue in his honor. The issue includes tributes by philosopher Ingrid Leman Stefanovic and geographers Edward Relph, Stanley Brunn, and Xu Huang. We include excerpts from five of Tuan’s many articles, chapters, and books.
This winter/spring issue also includes one book review and three essays:
Cognitive scientist Andrea Hiott reviews psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist’s 2009 The Master and His Emisary.
Zoologist Stephen Wood considers the phenomenon of noticing the natural world and the question of how this directed awareness unfolds.
Anthropologist Jenny Quillien provides a first-person ethnography of her recent residence in Alaska.
Religious-studies scholar Harry Oldmeadow discusses the sacredness of deserts, a theme that complements his earlier EAP essay on the holiness of mountains.
A complete digital EAP archive (1990-2022) is available at: http://krex.k-state.edu/dspace/handle/2097/1522.
David Seamon
Editor, Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology
A complete digital EAP archive (1990-2022) is available at: http://krex.k-state.edu/dspace/handle/2097/1522.
Prominent in the 1970s and 1980s, humanistic geography referred to a wide-ranging body of research emphasizing the central role of human experience and meaning in understanding peoples' relationship with geographical environments. Realizing that human engagement with the geographical world is complex and multivalent, humanistic geographers drew on qualitative approaches like phenomenology and hermeneutics to describe and interpret human actions and understandings as they both sustain and are sustained by geographical aspects of human life such as space, place, region, landscape, and natural environments.
An “in memoriam" for environmental psychologist Robert Sommer, who died in February, 2021;
A “book note” on architect Giulia Foscari’s Elements of Venice (2014).
A “book note” on architect and planner Matthew Carmona’s 3rd edition of Public Places, Urban Spaces (2021), an overview of urban-design theories, concepts, and practices.
Environmental educator Michael Maser’s explication of a place-based education grounded in what he calls “self-in-place.”
Philosopher John Russon’s discussion of parallels between love of place and love of human beings.
Philosopher Jeff Malpas’ consideration of the relation between “spirit of time” and “spirit of place.”
Cartographer Luke Harvey’s efforts to draw on the example of London parks to develop graphic means for presenting aspects of place experience visually.
Please note: If you are using a Mac machine, the full PDF will not appear properly unless you download the PDF. For some reason, academia.edu does not fully accommodate Apple products. As a result, a good number of the graphics of the issue don't appear.
1. Cover and contents
2.Foreword by Torsten Hagerstand
3. Introduction by Anne Buttimer
4. Afterword by David Seamon
The section on MOVEMENT examines the habitual nature of everyday environmental behaviors and argues, after French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962), that the lived foundation of these behaviors is the body as preconscious but intelligent subject (“body-subject”). The section on REST explores people’s attachment to place and gives particular attention to at-homeness and positive affective relationships with places and environments.
The book’s third section on ENCOUNTER considers the multifaceted ways in which people make or do not make attentive contact with their surroundings and explores such modes of awareness as obliviousness, noticing, watching, and more intense encounters.
In the book’s concluding section, the author examines the lived relationships and interconnections among movement, rest, and encounter and argues that their threefold structure offers one simple but integrated way to envision human environmental experience conceptually and to think about design and policy implications practically.
Dr. Phil. Tone Saevi,
Professor of Education,
VID Specialized University,
Bergen, Norway.
The quotation in the presentation title is from Mugerauer's 1988 HEIDEGGER'S LANGUAGE AND THINKING (NY: Humanities Press), p. 216.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1-XfZMDYmkMusmXuqmYZ5V6M92gcK_BcD
In this conference presentation, I discuss Christopher Alexander’s work in relation to a more comprehensive body of research and design that broadly might be called a “phenomenology of place and place making.” I begin by describing two contrasting ways of understanding wholeness—what I call “analytic relationality” and “synergistic relationality.” In analytic relationality, wholes are pictured as sets of parts external to each other and among which are located linkages involving stronger and weaker connections and interrelationships. In contrast, synergistic relationality understands wholes as dynamic, generative fields that sustain and are sustained by intensive parts that integrally belong to and support the whole. I suggest that, in terms of synergistic relationality, places can be envisioned as interconnected fields of intertwined relationships gathering and gathered by a lived intimacy between people and world. I illustrate how Alexander’s approach to place making assumes a synergistic understanding of place and contributes to understanding and making places that are whole, robust, and life-enhancing.
Key words: body-subject, lifeworld, lived body, Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology, place, situated cognition
Key words: body-subject, lifeworld, lived body, Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology, place, situated cognition
For this symposium on "words in environment-behavior research," I choose the word “lifeworld” to discuss because it is one phenomenological concept that sustains the lived wholeness of people-world and insulates one from falling back into the dualistic phrasing of people apart from world or person apart from environment.
I explore how many of Leiter’s photographs facilitate a rupture in what is seen so that the tacitness of perception is given attention. Because of some visual shift in the world’s usualness, viewers bring direct awareness to the “unusualness” of the situation seen; as a result, the perceptual stratum moves to the foreground because we are not exactly sure what we see.
I identify several ways in which Leiter’s photographs call into question our looking: Unraveling the ‘unknown’ through finding the recognizable; picturing parts of things; presenting mirror and window reflections that at first glance don’t make sense; portraying ordinary things oddly framed; and depicting unusual images of people-in-place.
In claiming Jacobs as a phenomenologist of the city, I examine the following themes:
• Jacobs’s mode of seeing and understanding as phenomenological method;
• Her claim that citiness is a phenomenon in its own right and has the power to draw and hold people to particular urban places;
• Her portrait of urban experience and place as they are founded in environmental embodiment;
• Her pointing toward a constellation of place relationships and processes that potentially strengthen or weaken citiness.
key words: Jane Jacobs, city, urban lifeworld, place, urban place, Jane Jacobs as phenomenologist, urban phenomenology, Death and Life of Great American Cities"
After delineating some of the key aspects of body-subject as it has relevance to environmental and architectural concerns, I present the passage from One Hundred Years of Solitude, provide two examples of student interpretation, and conclude with some evaluative comments on the students’ interpretations.
One of the most significant aspects of Goethe’s scientific efforts was his developing a method of study whereby the researcher might empathize with the thing studied and see it in a comprehensive, accurate way truthful to what the thing actually is, mostly via a method of engaged, qualitative encounter and description. Since the 1990s, this method of study has been associated broadly with a particular manner of phenomenology—more specifically, with a phenomenology of the natural world (Hennigfeld 2015; Seamon and Zajonc 1998; Simms 2005). A recent effort to draw on Goethe’s way of understanding the natural world is ecologist Craig Holdrege’s Seeing the Animal Whole and Why It Matters. In this book, Holdrege uses a Goethean approach to understand nine animals as they might be described “holistically,” by which the author means showing “how an animal’s many features are interconnected and are a revelation of the animal as a whole” (p. 12). The nine animals that Holdrege studies are the sloth, elephant, mole, bison, zebra, lion, giraffe, tadpole/frog, and dairy cow.
First formalized by geographer Yi-Fu Tuan in 1976, humanistic geography refers to a wide-ranging body of research emphasizing the importance of human experience and meaning in understanding people's relationship with places and geographical environments. ▪ Key geographic phenomena: space, place, home, mobility, in-placeness, out-of-placeness, landscape, region, nature, and human-made environments. Four key themes 1. Multidimensional understandings. Humanistic geographers emphasized that human life and experience is a dynamic, multivalent structure that incorporates bodily, sensory, emotional, attitudinal, cognitive, and transpersonal dimensions. Humanistic researchers argued that a comprehensive human geography must describe these many dimensions; understand what they contribute to environmental experience, action, and meaning; and seek out integrated frameworks identifying how these many dimensions relate and interact in supportive and undermining ways. 2. Open, empathetic methods. Humanistic geographers emphasized that much of human experience is opaque, ineffable, or beyond taken-for-granted awareness. To identify and describe these less accessible aspects of human life, humanistic geographers largely turned away from conventional scientific methods that required tangible, measurable phenomena explicated and correlated mathematically and statistically. Instead, humanistic geographers turned toward ontological perspectives that accepted a much wider range of experience and presence-e.g., phenomenology and hermeneutics. 3. Firsthand experience. Many humanistic geographers argued that, as much as possible, the evidence, general principles, and understandings of humanistic geography should arise from self-knowledge grounded in researchers' firsthand experiences. Research should work toward a forthright engagement with the experiences of others, whether those "others" are people, places, landscapes, elements of nature, aspects of the human-made environment, or other sentient beings. 4. Explication and interpretation. Broadly, humanistic geographers grounded their work in two complementary research models, the first of which can be identified as explications of experience; and the second, as interpretations of social worlds.
Single-family.
Walk-ups.
3. Medium high-rise (7 stories maximum).
4. Tall high-rise.
Panel 2: Embodied Wisdom—presentation begins at 27.30
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGGf-m10PYU&t=2661s
The published paper is available at:
https://mailchi.mp/hds/unveiling-the-mystical-rhythm-as-catalyst-for-altered-consciousness-mars-within?e=84b4c9d37d
One of the most laudable aspects of the Gurdjieff Work is its holistic character-a comprehensive, usable integration of psychological, transpersonal, and cosmological aspects. If phenomenology can be defined as a thorough, accurate rendition of human experience, then the practical and philosophical system offered by Gurdjieff includes a remarkable phenomenology of humans as three-centered beings to illustrate one set of insights relevant to phenomenological explication: his explication of what he calls the "instinctive-moving center" as it offers a refined, multivalent understanding of "embodied wisdom."
Now available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGGf-m10PYU&t=2661s
One of the most laudable aspects of the Gurdjieff Work is its holistic character—a comprehensive, usable integration of psychological, transpersonal, and cosmological aspects. If phenomenology can be defined as a thorough, accurate rendition of human experience, then the practical and philosophical system offered by Gurdjieff includes a remarkable phenomenology of humans as three-centered beings to illustrate one set of insights relevant to phenomenological explication: his explication of what he calls the “instinctive-moving center” as it offers a refined, multivalent understanding of “embodied wisdom.”
Darlington, Dorothy, Compiler and Editor. Saturday Evenings at Mendham: Conversations with Madame Ouspensky. New York: Gurdjieff Heritage Society, 2023. ISBN 978-1-7368823-0-6. Paperback, $19.95. 70pp.
Liska, Nella Denzey Markoe. Sacred Dances: The Gurdjieff Movements. Austin, TX: Karnak Press. ISBN 978-1-957278-04-9. Paperback, $28.00. 157pp.
This article discusses two complementary approaches to wholeness at least partly indebted to the system of selftransformation developed by spiritual teacher G. I. Gurdjieff: first, British philosopher of science Henri Bortoft's discussion of authentic wholeness; and second, British philosopher J. G. Bennett's systematics, a method for describing phenomena via the qualitative significance of numbers. The article begins with a review of the significance of wholeness in recent Western thinking, including Western esotericism. The article then highlights Bortoft and Bennett's approaches to wholeness and considers how their efforts relate to a Gurdjieffian point of view. The argument is made that Bortoft's discussion of understanding sets the stage for the manner of encountering and knowing presupposed by Bennett's systematics. The author then draws on Bennett's systematics interpretation of two-ness (the dyad) and four-ness (the tetrad) to illustrate how a systematics perspective clarifies the wholeness of the Gurdjieff Work as it is a comprehensive system of psychological and spiritual transformation.
Note: This version is the pre-final copy; errors in this copy have been corrected in the published version, including correcting the reference for Mrs. Staveley's description of Jane Heap.
I ask in this article whether there might be a canon of the Gurdjieff Work and, if so, what that canon might entail. The underlying assumption of canonicality is that limits must be imposed to help one locate a particular tradition’s works of most significant quality and standing (Bloom 1994, 35). Here, I ask what these significant works might be for “the Work”—the system of psychological and spiritual self-transformation set forth by G. I. Gurdjieff (c.1866-1949) and his student and associate P. D. Ouspensky (1878-1947).
1. Books by Bennett (for books and other entries on Subud, see category 6 below);
2. Edited compilations of Bennett’s lectures, writings, and editorial works;
3. Entries by Bennett in the journal Systematics;
4. Entries by Bennett in the in-house “Work” journals Enneagram and Impressions;
5. Other entries by Bennett relating to the Gurdjieff Work;
6. Entries by Bennett relating to Subud;
7. Other entries: Travelogue and scientific and academic articles.
Standard summaries of Gurdjieff’s methods of self-development identify three central components: his writings, facilitating students’ intellectual development; his music, facilitating students’ emotional development; and his sacred dances, or “Movements,” facilitating students’ bodily development, especially a deeper mode of corporeal awareness, engagement and presence. Azize’s book is an innovative addition to the Gurdjieff literature because he offers convincing evidence for a fourth key component that Gurdjieff introduced in his teaching starting around 1930—what he called “transformed-contemplation” exercises; i.e., precisely directed inner exercises strengthening students’ attention, intention, will, and self-awareness. Azize explains that these exercises were provided by Gurdjieff “so that the outer life (life in the social domain) and the inner life should be harmonized by the development of one’s individual reality, with consciousness, conscience, and will” (304).
Drawing on published works, unpublished archival sources, and firsthand accounts from students who worked directly with Gurdjieff, Azize aims to “introduce Gurdjieff’s inner exercises… to a wider world” (80). He attempts to “expound the nature and basis of Gurdjieff’s contemplative methods and to explore his sources, to the degree that is possible” (5). Azize contends that, from one perspective, Gurdjieff can be understood as “a ‘mystic’ who, in his earliest efforts, tried to fashion a workable system [of spiritual development] without contemplative methods, but later found them necessary supplements to his practical methods.”
This article is now published; readers who would like a PDF, please contact the author at:
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Tradução de "Jumping, Joyous Urban Jumble"-Phenomenology of Urban Place de David Seamon (2011) O ano de 2011 marca o 50º aniversário sobre o extraordinário e influencial obra de Jane Jacobs "Death and Life of Great American Cities" (Jacobs 1961/1993), um livro que ajudou na mudança de várias urbanidades, conhecendo e tratando de diversas cidades. Ainda que o seu trabalho nunca tenha sido associado à fenomenologia, pretende-se neste artigo, em termos de método, intenção e descobertas, explicar que Jacobs (1916-2006) pode justamente ser descrita como fenomenologista do espaço urbano. Muitos dos seus argumentos, descobertas de sintaxe espacial, particularmente a sua afirmação de que pequenos blocos de edificado oferecem uma malha permeável, de variadas rotas que contribui para a vitalidade da cidade e da caminhabilidade inerente e para uma robustez do sentido de vizinhança ou vivência em comunidade. Em toda a sua escrita (1961/1993, 1992, 2000) esta diz implicitamente sobre a fenomenologia das cidades, da experiencia urbana, da exuberância da vizinhança, do ambiente como um todo, até mesmo uma fenomenologia da economia que deve ser colocada no seu lugar (Jacobs 1969, 1984). A sua visão de cidade ideal seria "cada vez mais diversa, densa e dinâmica". Sempre viu e explicou que "existiria uma complexidade inexplicável nos mais modestos detalhes", por exemplo o típico passeio ou rua. Em todo o seu trabalho declarou que cidades e a sua vivência nas mesmas, conjugam um integral, inexplicável papel na vida humana e na sua história. Se ignorarmos esta importância fulcral, estaremos a desabilitar a capacidade vivência e a exuberância de todo o mundo. Modo de entender de J. Jacobs como um Método Fenomenológico Como método de estudo, fenomenologia procura ser aberta ao fenómeno em si, para que se possa revelar a ele mesmo e ser o mais compreendido possível. Na sua obra, Jacobs argumenta que o desenho urbano e planeamento de meados do século XX foram influenciadas, nem sempre da melhor forma nas cidades americanas porque os profissionais perceberam o fenómeno de cidade, não por aquilo que era mas pelo que os profissionais de trabalho quisessem que esta o fosse, por exemplo Le Corbusier com o seu trabalho "torres no parque", A rede de novas vilas nas periferias de Louis Mumford, ou o renovar de políticas e construção massiva de autoestradas de Robert Moses. Trabalhadores e investigadores do urbanismo: 18/02/2020