Metal Isolationist Aesthetics

AVANT: Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies, 2020

In this text it is argued that immersion in virtual reality (VR) with the aid of contemporary VR equipment may offer access to novel types of virtual worlds that differ qualitatively from the “real” world and from other types of fictional worlds. The text begins by (a) distinguishing between VR systems, virtual environments, and virtual worlds; (b) showing how the virtual worlds facilitated by VR systems resemble and differ from the “virtual worlds” created in one’s mind when, for example, reading a novel or watching a film; and (c) identifying necessary and optional elements of a VR-facilitated virtual world. Employing a phenomenological approach that draws on the thought of Ingarden and Norberg-Schulz, it is shown that a visitor to a VR-facilitated virtual world can (and frequently does) shift his or her conscious attention along three different “axes”. First, one’s attention can move “horizontally” between the media that disclose the virtual world through different senses. Second, one’s attention can shift “vertically” between the virtual world’s different ontological strata, including its layers of myriad atomic stimuli; distinguishable elements that possess spatiotemporal extension; assemblages of elements that have a context and relations but lack individual meaning; glimpses that build up a lattice of meaning and contribute to one’s knowledge of the world; and the virtual world envisioned as a coherent mentally concretized whole. Third, one’s attention can shift “interspatially” between the many different overlapping constituent spaces of the virtual world, including its perceptual, concrete, natural, built, identifiable, technological, emotional, social, economic, political, cultural, ecological, and possibility spaces. This triaxial phenomenological framework can shed new light on the rich and diverse ways in which VR-facilitated virtual worlds manifest themselves as emergent wholes constituted within human consciousness; also, it suggests approaches by which visitors might more proactively mentally explore and come to inhabit such virtual worlds.

Roman Ingarden and His Times, 2020

While Roman Ingarden’s ontology and aesthetics have been widely studied, relatively little attention has been paid to his philosophical anthropology – despite the central role that it plays within his thought. Here we draw on the concept of the “relatively isolated system,” developed by Ingarden over more than three decades, in order to show how his philosophical model of the human being as a three-layered emergent whole can be understood as a particular application of his more generalized systems theory. Having reconstructed Ingarden’s systems-theoretical philosophical anthropology, it is argued that it provides a uniquely valuable methodological approach and tool for investigating those emerging processes of technological posthumanization that are diversifying and transforming human societies by expanding them to incorporate new types of non-human intelligent social actors (e.g., increasingly sophisticated social robots and AI) and “otherly” human beings (e.g., individuals whose capacities have been altered through neuroprosthetic augmentation). Conventional philosophical investigations that take as their starting point the status of human beings as biological, intentional, or moral beings often focus on the ways in which contemporary social robots and AI lack such status and thereby differ radically from human beings. However, by starting from the fact that all such entities are manifestations of relatively isolated systems, an Ingardenian systems-theoretical philosophical anthropology can highlight previously unappreciated similarities shared by the “naturally” human, otherly human, and non-human intelligent social beings expected to coexist within increasingly posthumanized societies.

The Polish Journal of Aesthetics, 2018

Here the concept of the human being as a “relatively isolated system” developed in Ingarden’s later phenomenology is adapted into an “aesthetics of isolation” that complements conventional environmental aesthetics. Such an aesthetics of isolation is especially relevant, given the growing “aesthetic overload” brought about by ubiquitous computing and new forms of art and aesthetic experience such as those involving virtual reality, interactive online performance art, and artificial creativity.

Horizon. Studies in Phenomenology, 2019

's (1893-1970) philosophical legacy is not limited exclusively to ontology, as it usually is regarded. His thought also addresses aesthetics, philosophical anthropology, epistemology, ethics, axiology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, logic, philosophy of literature and original considerations on the history of philosophy. Ingarden's philosophical investigations concern, but are not limited to such topics as the status of the world, intentionality, experience, the notion of object, intersubjective cognition, the existence and cognition of the literary artwork, time, the question of aesthetic and moral values, responsibility, and causal relations. What unites these different topics and accounts in Ingarden's philosophical enterprise as a coherent project is the phenomenological approach, which Ingarden employs at the preliminary stage of research. Ingarden-who is educated in Lvov under Kazimierz Twardowski (1866-1938) and later in Göttingen and in Freiburg im Breisgau under Edmund Husserl (1859-1938)-is one of the key figures of the Göttingen Circle and develops in the eidetic line of the phenomenological movement. Although from the very beginning, he criticizes Husserl for falling into idealism and for adopting a transcendental stance, his own original philosophical project is formulated in a lifelong discussion with Husserl's ideas. At the same time, his project is influenced by other prominent philosophical personalities of modern and contemporary philosophy, including Kant, Bergson, Scheler, Hartmann, Conrad-Martius, Stein, not to mention the Lvov-Warsaw School of logic, and many others with whom he discusses the most important philosophical questions. As a result, Ingarden's philosophy connects different traditions, while also presenting an original contribution to the 20 th century philosophy and, more generally, to humanities, e.g., to the New Criticism, one of the dominant trends in Anglo-American literary theory and criticism. On the occasion of and to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Ingarden's death, this volume presents the reader with the present collection of in-depth studies INTRODUCTION

2019

The Japanese Government’s “Society 5.0” initiative aims to create a cyber-physical society in which (among other things) citizens’ daily lives will be enhanced through increasingly close collaboration with artificially intelligent systems. However, an apparent paradox lies at the heart of efforts to create a more “human-centered” society in which human beings will live alongside a proliferating array of increasingly autonomous social robots and embodied AI. This study seeks to investigate the presumed human-centeredness of Society 5.0 by comparing its makeup with that of earlier societies. By distinguishing “technological” and “non-technological” processes of posthumanization and applying a phenomenological anthropological model, the study demonstrates: (1) how the diverse types of human and non-human members expected to participate in Society 5.0 differ qualitatively from one another; (2) how the dynamics that will shape the membership of Society 5.0 can be conceptualized; and (3) how the anticipated membership of Society 5.0 differs from that of Societies 1.0 through 4.0. The study describes six categories of prospective human and non-human members of Society 5.0 and shows that all six have analogues in earlier societies – which suggests that social scientific analysis of past societies may shed unexpected light on the nature of Society 5.0.

Frontiers of Narrative Studies, 2018

Considering that enacitivsm emerged in rebellion against the representativism of first-generation cognitive science, an enactivist approach to narrative, which after all does relate events, situations, people, necessitates a directly realistic (i. e. anti-representationalist) concept of perspective on literary objects. Ingarden’s description of the spatio-temporal properties of the cognizing of the literary work, in the process of which the reader transgresses the realm of signs (representation) toward embodied and culturally embedded cognition of objects and events in a presented world, may serve as a prototype for an enactive approach narrative, provided the theory in question is situated in its original context, for example that of Ingarden’s ongoing discussion with structuralism regarded at this juncture as a representationist stance. In the first step, I am referring to the philosophical tradition of direct realism, which was apparently invigorated by the theories of embodied a...

Urbanity and Architecture Files / Teka Komisji Urbanistyki i Architektury, 2018

Here Ingarden’s concept of the “relatively isolated system” is used to develop a phenomenology of architecture that emphasizes the way in which a structure’s boundary and openings define an “inside” and “outside” and regulate passage between them. This approach is compared with Norberg-Schulz’s. The Ingardenian approach’s strengths include its compatibility with biomimetic form-finding and its insights for future architectural practice that is expected to become increasingly “posthumanized.” / W artykule zastosowano Ingardena pojęcie „systemu względnie izolowanego,” aby sformułować fenomenologię architektury podkreślającą sposób, w jaki granica struktury i otwory w niej definiują „wnętrze” i „zewnętrze” i regulują przepływ między nimi. Podejście to porównane jest z myślą Norberga-Schulza. Zaletą podejścia ingardenowskiego są, m.in., zgodność z biomimetycznym wynajdowaniem formy i nowe spojrzenie w przyszłe praktyki architektoniczne, które będą coraz bardziej „posthumanizowane.”

2018

In some circumstances, immersion in virtual environments with the aid of virtual reality (VR) equipment can create feelings of anxiety in users and be experienced as something “frightening”, “oppressive”, “alienating”, “dehumanizing”, or “dystopian”. Sometimes (e.g., in exposure therapy or VR gaming), a virtual environment is intended to have such psychological impacts on users; however, such effects can also arise unintentionally due to the environment’s poor architectural design. Designers of virtual environments may employ user-centered design (UCD) to incrementally improve a design and generate a user experience more closely resembling the type desired; however, UCD can yield suboptimal results if an initial design relied on an inappropriate architectural approach. This study developed a framework that can facilitate the purposeful selection of the most appropriate architectural approach by drawing on Norberg-Schulz’s established phenomenological account of real-world architectural modes. By considering the unique possibilities for structuring and experiencing space within virtual environments and reinterpreting Norberg-Schulz’s schemas in the context of virtual environment design, a novel framework was formulated that explicates six fundamental “architectural paradigms” available to designers of virtual environments. It was shown that the application of this framework could easily be incorporated as an additional step within the UCD process.

2020

This is a special issue of the Journal of East-West Thought guest-edited by Chenyang Li an Dascha During, including the following articles: 1. Introduction by C Li and D. Düring 2. Itay Shani, The Lure of Beauty: Harmony as a Conduit of Self- transcendence 3. Jörg Löschke, Harmony, Organic Unity, and Intrinsic Value 4. Dascha Düring, Harmony and Justice 5. Tak-lap Yeung, Two Conceptions of Harmony 6. Shuchen Xiang, Race and Harmony 7. Alice Simionato, Harmony and Li (Coherence) 8. Olivier Malherbe, Gestalt, Harmony and human Action in Roman Ingarden’s Thought Book Review by Han Shu-an: Comprehensive Harmony Thomé H. Fang’s Philosophy

Phainomena, 2024

The aesthetics of Roman Ingarden and Nicolai Hartmann are phenomenological in the Husserlian sense of the term. Although both Ingarden as well as Hartmann owe their ideas to Husserl, each of them worked independently of the other and provided different accounts with regard to the anatomy and the mode of existence of the literary work of art, which have proven to be invaluable for its study. While Ingarden’s account utilizes the properties of conscious acts to explain the appearance of an aesthetic object, Hartmann employs the founding properties of the conscious acts in the human temporality, within which these acts are performed. However, there are also some specific similarities to be found in their theories of ontology, concerning the “stratified structures” of the different kinds of aesthetic objects. The present paper is an attempt to develop a comparison with respect to certain questions related to Ingarden’s and Hartmann’s ontologies of the literary work of art. The aim is to answer these questions from the point of view of both Ingarden as well as Hartmann.