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The thesis discusses affinities between physical and psychical spaces in selected works of D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and Wyndham Lewis in connection with the main philosophical and aesthetic problems posed by the changes in modernist representation of character with respect to space and place. In doing so, the argument assesses the "in-human humanism" of D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf which manifests itself in the interrelation between states of mind and material universe, the way in which the consciousness accommodates various material "admixtures" and how subjectivity "escapes" from subject to its own outside. Using the conservative thought of Wyndham Lewis as a vital source of comparison, the thesis examines how the interaction of these newly constructed modernist subjectivities with space changes and challenges traditional ideas of unity of self, personal identity and autonomous agency. Drawing on a number of themes from visual arts, the discussion connects these psychical factors with the notions of solidity and fluidity/stability and instability of material reality and individual objects, moving bodies or things in space. As a part of this, the thesis incorporates a detailed discussion of Italian Futurism, especially F. T. Marinetti's and Umberto Boccioni's theories of physical...

Tez (Yüksek Lisans) - Süleyman Demirel Üniversitesi, Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü, Felsefe ve Din Bilimleri Anabilim Dalı, 2007. / Bibliyografya var.

This thesis investigates the interplay between explanatory issues in special relativity and the theory's metaphysical foundations. Special attention is given to the 'dynamical approach' to relativity, promoted primarily by Harvey Brown and collaborators, according to which the symmetries of dynamical laws are explanatory of relativistic effects, inertial motion, and even the Minkowskian geometrical structure of a specially relativistic world. The thesis begins with a review of Einstein's 1905 introduction to special relativity, after which brief historical introductions are given for the standard 'geometrical' approach to relativity and the unorthodox 'dynamical' approach. After a critical review of recent literature on the topic, the dynamical approach is shown to be in need of a metaphysical package that would undergird the explanatory claims mentioned above. It is argued that the dynamical approach is best understood as a form of relationalism - in particular, as a relativistic form of 'regularity relationalism', promoted recently by Nick Huggett. According to this view, some portion of a world's geometrical structure actually supervenes upon the symmetries of the best-system dynamical laws for a material ontology endowed with a primitive sub-metrical structure. To explore the plausibility of this construal of the dynamical approach, a case study is carried out on solutions to the Klein-Gordon equation. Examples are found for which the field values, when purged of all spatiotemporal structure but their induced topology, are still arguably best-systematized by the Klein-Gordon equation itself. This bolsters the plausibility of the claim that some system of field values, endowed with mere sub-metrical structure, might have as its best-systems dynamical laws a (set of) Lorentz-covariant equation(s), on which Minkowski geometrical structure would supervene. The upshot is that the dynamical approach to special relativity can be defended as what might be called an ontologically and ideologically relationalist approach to Minkowski spacetime structure. The chapters refer regularly to three appendices, which include a brief introduction to topological and differentiable spaces.

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Recent calls from progressive, subaltern and postcolonial geopoliticians to move geopolitical scholarship away from its Western ontological bases have argued that more ethnographic studies centred on peripheral and dispossessed geographies need to be undertaken in order to integrate peripheralised agents and agencies in dominant ontologies of geopolitics. This thesis follows these calls. Through empirical data collected during a period of five months of fieldwork undertaken between October 2014 and March 2015, it investigates the ways through which an Indigenous community of the Canadian Arctic, Tulita (located in the Northwest Territories' Sahtu region) represents geopower. It suggests a semiotic reading of these representations in order to take the agency of other-than/more-than-human beings into account. In doing so, it identifies the ontological bases through which geopolitics can be indigenised. Drawing from Dene animist ontologies, it indeed introduces the notion of a place-contingent speculative geopolitics. Two overarching argumentative lines are pursued. First, this thesis contends that geopower operates through metamorphic refashionings of the material forms of, and signs associated with, space and place. Second, it infers from this that through this transformational process, geopower is able to create the conditions for alienating but also transcending experiences and meanings of place to emerge. It argues that this movement between conflictual and progressive understandings is dialectical in nature. In addition to its conceptual suggestions, this thesis makes three empirical contributions. First, it confirms that settler geopolitical narratives of sovereignty assertion in the North cannot be disentangled from capitalist and industrial political-economic processes. Second, it shows that these processes, and the geopolitical visions that subtend them, are materialised in space via the extension of the urban fabric into Indigenous lands. Third, it demonstrates that by assembling space ontologically in particular ways, geopower establishes (and entrenches) a geopolitical distinction between living/sovereign (or governmentalised) spaces and nonliving/bare spaces (or spaces of nothingness).