Richard A. Etlin demonstrates how the conceptual basis of the modern house and the physical layout of the modern city emerged from debates among theoretically innovative French architects of the eighteenth century. Examining a broad range of topics from architecture and urbanism to gardening and funerary monuments, he reconsiders eighteenth-century French architecture with regard to the ways in which it was informed by symbolic space. This book provides an accessible introduction to a century of architecture that transformed the classical forms of the Renaissance and Baroque periods into building types still familiar today.

Symbolic Landscapes presents a definitive collection of landscape/place studies that explores symbolic, cultural levels of geographical meanings. Essays written by philosophers, geographers, architects, social scientists, art historians, and literati, bring specific modes of expertise and perspectives to this transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary study of the symbolic level human existential spatiality. Placing emphasis on the pre-cognitive genesis of symbolic meaning, as well as embodied, experiential (lived) geography, the volume offers a fresh, quasi-phenomenological approach. The editors articulate the epistemological doctrine that perception and imagination form a continuum in which both are always implicated as complements. This approach makes a case for the interrelation of the geography of perception and the geography of imagination, which means that human/cultural geography offers only an abstraction if indeed an aesthetic geography is constituted merely as a sub-field. Human/cultural geography can only approach spatial reality through recognizing the intimate interrelative dialectic between the imaginative and perceptual meanings of our landscapes/place-worlds. This volume reinvigorates the importance of the topic of symbolism in human/cultural geography, landscape studies, philosophy of place, architecture and planning, and will stand among the classics in the field.

Community provides a constructive collection of essays offering biblical and theological reflections on the topic of community in honor of the Mennonite Old Testament scholar August H. Konkel's seventieth birthday. As such, Community follows the trajectory of Gus's own myriad contributions to scholarship that have been intentionally engaged both on behalf of and as a lively and constructive member of such community. These essays present forays across the spectrum of biblical and theological studies that intersect with the many contributions of Gus's life work.

Space in the Hebrew Bible is increasingly studied from the perspective of critical spatiality, emphasizing the social and cultural dimension of space, how people experience space, and their creativity in constructing space. Zhenshuai Jiang investigates the discourses on space in Gen 1-11 and discusses the connection between social space and spatial narrative. He deals with various questions in different spatial terms, with a detailed textual analysis of Gen 1-11. How is space constructed in Gen 1-11? To what extent and how is this construction influenced by social and cultural elements? The author describes specifically how space in Gen 1-11 is constructed rhetorically, taking into account historical and social circumstances in which the texts were written.

While sectarian violence has greatly diminished on the streets of Belfast and Derry, proxy battles over the right to define Northern Ireland’s identity through its new symbolic landscapes continue. Offering a detailed ethnographic account of Northern Ireland’s post-conflict visual transformation, this book examines the official effort to produce new civic images against a backdrop of ongoing political and social struggle. Interviews with politicians, policymakers, community leaders, cultural workers, and residents shed light on the deeply contested nature of seemingly harmonized urban landscapes in societies undergoing radical structural change. Here, the public art process serves as a vital means to understanding the wider politics of a transforming public sphere in an age of globalization and transnational connectivity.

The Whole Part describes a basic model of cognition that uses parts, wholes, and references to analyze both our material and mental experience. The framework of continuous epistemological space, rather than discrete symbolic logic, is used to provide a formal foundation for thinking about reality. Mereological analysis of that space examines things in terms of their whole/part relationships, and referential analysis of that space examines things in terms of their reference/referent relationships. These analyses are used to illustrate the structure of our minds. Since our mental structures determine how reality is sensed and conceptualized, understanding these structures clarifies which aspects of our experience are due to the world and which are due to various facets of our cognition. You will particularly enjoy this book if you are interested in how our minds work, since it explores the structure and operation of our cognition in great detail. To do so, a basic model is constructed that provides an understanding of the relationship of wholes to parts, references to referents, and how those relationships influence and are influenced by cognition. This model is simple enough to be independent of various complexities in neuroscience and physics, although it is both motivated by those sciences and entirely compatible with them.

This work by Pierre Bourdieu develops the anthropological theory which has formed the basis of his scientific research. It discusses the problems posed by "structuralist" philosophers in order to solve or dissolve them.