[...] Il crollo della mente è un evento che non è stato percepito e adeguatamente segnalato forse a causa dell’eccessiva attenzione verso l’intelligenza artificiale e le neuroscienze [...] L’estetica tradizionale non riesce più a spiegare che cosa accade intorno a noi, e che cosa proviamo [...]
Festival internazionale della Filosofia in Sila: alcune foto - foto di Gaetano Mirabella, in fondo.
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"E se l’amore non fosse altro che una sofisticata, arcaica (...)

The Point of Being

Edited by

Derrick de Kerckhove and Cristina Miranda de Almeida

Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014

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• Current digital processes of production, reproduction and distribution of information affect the perception of time, space, matter, senses and identity. This book explores the research question: what are the psycho-physiological dimensions of the ways people experience their presence in the world and the world’s presence in them? Because they deal principally with issues of perception and sentience, with a particular emphasis on art, there is in all chapters an invitation to experience a shift of perception. An embodied sensation of the world and a re-sensorialization of the environment are described to complement the visually-biased perspective with a renewed sense of humans’ relationship to their spatial and material surrounding. As such, this book presents the topological reunion of sensation and cognition, of sense and sensibility and of body, self and world.

• The perception of the “Point of Being”, to which the various chapters of this book invite the reader, proposes an alternative to the “Point of View” inherited from the Renaissance; it offers a way to situate the sense of self through the physical, digital and electronic domains that shape physical, social, cultural, economic and spiritual conditions at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

• Nine authors explore different ways in which the paradigm of the Point of Being can bridge the interval, the discontinuity, between subjects and objects that began with the diffusion of the phonetic alphabet. The Point of Being is a signpost on that journey.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures............................................................................................ vii

Acknowledgements .................................................................................... ix
  Derrick de Kerckhove and Cristina Miranda de Almeida

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1
  Derrick de Kerckhove and Cristina Miranda de Almeida

Chapter One ................................................................................................. 9
  The Point of Being
  Derrick de Kerckhove

Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 61
  Orbanism
  Rosane Araújo

Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 79
  Toward the Reunion of Sense and Sensibility: The Body in the Age of Electronic Trans-nature
  Gaetano Mirabella

Chapter Four ............................................................................................ 103
  The Interval as a New Approach to Interfaces: Towards a Cognitive and Aesthetic Paradigm of Communication in the Performing Arts
  Isabelle Choinière

Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 147 The Aesthetics of the Between in Korean Culture
  Jung A Huh

Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 165
  Sensing without Sensing: Could Virtual Reality Support Korean Rituals?
  Semi Ryu

Chapter Seven .......................................................................................... 197
  Between Sense and Intellect: Blindness and the Strength of Inner Vision
  Loretta Secchi

Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 213
  The Connective Heart
  Cristina Miranda de Almeida

Chapter Nine ............................................................................................ 297
  Quantum-Inspired Spirituality: Merging Science and Religion in the Post-Galilean Period
  Maria Luisa Malerba

Editors and Contributors .......................................................................... 335

Index ........................................................................................................ 341