Online research in philosophy

Looking at the finding of several archeoastronomers, who examine the relationship of built cultures to celestial bodies, this essay speculates on the unique relationship of the inhabitants of Chaco Canyon in New Mexico to the earth and sky. The Anasazi who populated this region suddenly disappeared around 1000 A.D. and little is known about their culture, religion, and world except by studying the structures they left behind. This essay looks at their kivas, dwellings, the puzzling “Sun dagger” monument, and the (...) petroglyphs throughout the canyon to understand the many ways that each structure through use of light andspace marked the occurrence of a surprising number of celestial events. There is good evidence that the Anasazi dwelled within the sky and felt a continuity between earth and sky in a way to which postmodern cultures have little access. The unity of body and surround, especially as ascending into the sky from the earth, is linked to a spirituality at odds with the legacy of Plato and others, who oppose the celestial to the earthly, as an inferior realm. (shrink)

The critique of tourism as being only a distanced, detached, and consumerist passing through of foreign landscapes and cultures isdisputed in this essay. The idea that tourism necessarily fits the paradigm of inauthenticity as the tranquilized and alienated hopping from spot to spot in prepackaged, superficial presentations is contrasted with another sense of tourism as drawing upon the potential power of the glance to disrupt the everyday, to focus on the particular, to be surprised by the new, and to bodily (...) join up with the rhythms of place being as shifting. Authenticity is seen in both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty to be primarily about a greater bodily awareness of surround and transformation of the self as an ongoing process of “selving” that yields a more singular sense of who one is in relationship to places and their interconnectedness. To gain a better sense of oneself in one own being or uniqueness is to gain more meaning through emplacement within the surround. The glance at a new world can open up an “interplace” which expands anddeepens the sense of who we are in the interconnection and reverberations among places. (shrink)

Earthbodies describes how our bodies are open circuits to a sensual magic and planetary care that when closed off leads to disastrous detours, such as illness, ...