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31Virtual Reality: The Last Human Narrative?Brill | Rodopi. 2015.Is virtual reality the latest grand narrative that humanity has produced? This book attempts to disentangle the common characteristics of human reality and posthuman virtual reality by examining discourses on psychoanalysis, gene-technology, globalization, and contemporary art.
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577Confucianism, Puritanism, and the TranscendentalProtoSociology 28 153-172. 2011.Max Weber examined Chinese society and European Puritanism at the beginning of the Twentieth Century in order to find out why capitalism did not develop in China. He found that Confucianism and Puritanism are mutually exclusive, which enabled him to oppose both in the form of two different kinds of rationalism. I attempt neither to refute nor to confirm the Weberian thought model. Instead I show that a similar model applies to Jean Baudrillard’s vision of American culture, a culture that he dete…Read more
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56"Iki," style, trace: Shūzō kuki and the spirit of hermeneuticsPhilosophy East and West 47 (4): 554-580. 1997.There are parallels between the Japanese philosopher Shūzō Kuki and the European philosophers Heidegger and Derrida with regard to their philosophical discourses on the idea of style and their respective elaboration of this notion as a playful quantity that needs to be seized by equally playful philosophical approaches
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23The Heated French Debate on Comparative Philosophy Continues: Philosophy versus PhilologyPhilosophy East and West 64 (1): 218-228. 2014.
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27European Transfigurations—Eurafrica and Eurasia: Coudenhove and Trubetzkoy RevisitedThe European Legacy 12 (5): 565-575. 2007.The Eurasianist movement launched a theory according to which Russia does not belong to Europe but forms, together with its Asian colonies, a separate continent named “Eurasia” whose Eastern border is the Pacific Ocean. Similarily, in the early 1920s, Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, the founder of the Pan-European movement, developed, the idea of “Eurafrica.” I compare the writings of Coudenhove and those of Nicolas S. Trubetzkoy and show how the idea of Europe was used as an anti-essentialist model…Read more
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50Contingency and the "time of the dream": Kuki shūzō and French prewar philosophyPhilosophy East and West 50 (4): 481-506. 2000.There are many links between Kuki Shūzō and the French philosophy of the 1920s that treated the phenomenon of contingency. Examined are (1) the problem of time as it presented itself to French philosophers at the beginning of the twentieth century and its reception by Kuki as an Oriental philosopher and a Buddhist; (2) the problem of liberty and of existence in these French philosophers and in Buddhism; and (3) the phenomenon of the dream as a psychic and aesthetic phenomenon for Kuki and for th…Read more
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64Style and Substance in The Matrix : Stacy Gillis. Ed. (2005) The Matrix Triology: Cyberpunk ReloadedFilm-Philosophy 12 (1): 107-116. 2008.
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12Born in Vyborg in 1884 by parents of German descent, Vasily (Wilhelm) Sesemann grew up and studied in St. Petersburg. A close friend of Viktor Zhirmunsky and Lev P. Karsavin, Sesemann taught from the early 1920s until his death in 1963 at the universities of Kaunas and Vilnius in Lithuania (interrupted only by his internment in a Siberian labor camp from 1950 to 1956). Botz-Bornstein's study takes up Sesemann's idea of experience as a dynamic, constantly self-reflective, ungraspable phenomenon t…Read more
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119Genes, memes, and the chinese concept of Wen : Toward a nature/culture model of geneticsPhilosophy East and West 60 (2). 2010.The Chinese concept of wen is examined here in the context of contemporary gene theory and the "cultural branch" of gene theory called "memetics." The Chinese notion of wen is an untranslatable term meaning "pattern," "structure," "writing," and "literature." Wen hua—generally translated as "culture"—signifies the process through which one adopts wen. However, this process is not simply one of civilizational mimesis or imitation but the "creation" of a new pattern. Within a gene-wen debate we ar…Read more
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85Dreams in buddhism and western aesthetics: Some thoughts on play, style and spaceAsian Philosophy 17 (1). 2007.Several Buddhist schools in India, China and Japan concentrate on the interrelationships between waking and dreaming consciousness. In Eastern philosophy, reality can be seen as a dream and an obscure 'reality beyond' can be considered as real. In spite of the overwhelming Platonic-Aristotelian-Freudian influence existent in Western culture, some Western thinkers and artists - Valéry, Baudelaire, and Schnitzler, for example - have been fascinated by a kind of 'simple presence' contained in dream…Read more
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56The Conscious and the Unconscious in History:Lévi-Strauss, Collingwood, Bally, BarthesJournal of the Philosophy of History 6 (2): 151-172. 2012.Claude Lévi-Strauss holds that history and anthropology differ in their choice of complementary perspectives: history organizes its data in relation to conscious expressions of social life, while anthropology proceeds by examining its unconscious foundations. For R. G. Collingwood historical science discovers not only pure facts but considers a whole series of thoughts constituting historical life. Also Lévi-Strauss sees this: “To understand history it is necessary to know not only how things ar…Read more
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53Realism, Dream, and 'Strangeness' in Andrei TarkovskyFilm-Philosophy 8 (3). 2004.At the centre of theories of film form is the idea that the montage of different scenes produces cinematic time. Montage creates a conflict between different shots, and time (as a purely functional relationship between shots) arises out of montage as an abstract element
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62Mapping Film Studies: Symposium on Dominique Château's Cinéma et philosophieFilm-Philosophy 10 (2): 82-86. 2006.
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35John Orr (2014) The Demons of Modernity: Ingmar Bergman and European CinemaFilm-Philosophy 19 (1). 2015.
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23The New Surrealism: Lost Stories, Reality Television and Amateur Dream-CensorsJanus Head 9 (1): 181-186. 2006.“Reality television” is inspired by a particular fascination with “reality.” The detached way of “narrating” events with its occasional emergence of all-too-human constellations comes closer to that of dreaming than to that of analysis, consumption, or first-degree simulation. In the end, however, reality television adopts the form of an anti-narrative in which conventional narrative and receptive devices have not been overcome in order to create a real aesthetic of dreams, but have been overtur…Read more
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14Films and Dreams: Tarkovsky, Bergman, Sokurov, Kubrick, and Wong Kar-WaiLexington Books. 2007.Films and Dreams considers the essential link between films and the world of dreams. Thorsten Botz-Bornstein reveals a common structure of "dreamtense" in the works of major filmmakers like Tarkovsky, Sokurov, Bergman, and Wong Kar-wai
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38Cardboard houses with wings: The architecture of alabama's rural studioJournal of Aesthetic Education 44 (3): 16-22. 2010.The Rural Studio, which was founded by Samuel Mockbee in 1992 and lead by him until his death in 2001, continues its activities. Its specialty is, now as before, the design of innovative houses for poor people living in Alabama's second-poorest county, Hale County, by relying largely on donated and salvaged materials. The houses are made of car windshields, surplus carpet tiles, baled cardboard, old street signs, license plates, etc. Alexis de Tocqueville has said that democracy lowers the stand…Read more
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24Shûzô Kuki et la 'philosophie de la contingence' françaiseRevue Philosophique De Louvain 97 (1): 113-126. 1999.
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19Place and Dream: Japan and the Virtual (edited book)BRILL. 2004.This is a book about space. On a first level, it reflects traditional Japanese ideas of space against various “items” of Western culture. Among these items are Bakhtin's “dialogicity”, Wittgenstein’s Lebensform, and “virtual space” or “globalized” space as representatives of the latest development of an “alienated”, modern spatial experience. Some of the Western concepts of space appear as negative counter examples to “basho-like”, Japanese places; others turn out to be compatible with the Japan…Read more
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64Kitsch and BullshitPhilosophy and Literature 39 (2): 305-321. 2015.Harry Frankfurt’s twenty-two page long essay “On Bullshit” was published in 1986 in an academic journal and appeared as a stand-alone book in 2005. The small book was successful and has sparked many discussions by both academics and public intellectuals. In this article I want to examine if, in the realm of art, kitsch overlaps with bullshit as a sort of “aesthetic bullshit” or if there are differences between bullshit as a predominantly ethical phenomenon and kitsch, which works much more with …Read more
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55Is Critical Regionalist Philosophy Possible?Comparative and Continental Philosophy 2 (1): 11-25. 2010.In architecture, the concept of Critical Regionalism gained popularity as a synthesis of universal, “modern” elements and individualistic elements derived from local cultures. Critical Regionalist alternatives are more than a postmodern mix of ethno styles but integrate conceptual qualities like local light, perspective, and tectonic quality into a modern architectural framework. In order to “critically” root architectural works in their corresponding traditions, Critical Regionalists base their…Read more
Thorsten Botz-Bornstein
Gulf University For Science And Technology
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Gulf University For Science And TechnologyProfessor
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy, Misc |
Other Academic Areas |
Areas of Interest
Aesthetics |
Continental Philosophy |
Philosophy, Misc |
Other Academic Areas |