Advanced search Subscribe to our newsletter and you'll continuously be informed about our new books, series and journals. You can customize this e-mail newsletter to your particular needs and interests. Newsletters include special discount codes. To subscribe or change existing preferences press the subscribe button	Series and Journals Dimensions of Apeiron. A Topological Phenomenology of Space, Time, and Individuation. ROSEN, Steven M. Amsterdam/New York, NY, 2004, xxiv, 238 pp. Pb: 978-90-420-1199-1 / 90-420-1199-8 € 45 / US$ 61 Series: Value Inquiry Book Series 154 Philosophy and Psychology an intellectually courageous attempt … this book is highly original and thought-provoking… highly recommended to those who struggle to understand their way of understanding. Systems Research and Behavioral Science 22 (2005) In this challenging, integrative work, Steven Rosen explores the roots of the crisis of postmodernity: the widespread “fragmentation of human culture”. … By juxtaposing and integrating images and ideas that reorient dualistic assumptions, Rosen creates a sense of overlapping transparencies that invite the reader to see through many perspectives simultaneously. … he points us toward a new science of experiential reflection that questions the limits of the conceptual so that we may “think our own thinking” The Journal of Mind and Behavior, Vol. 25 No. 4, Autumn 2004 This book explores the evolution of space and time from the apeiron —the spaceless, timeless chaos of primordial nature. Rosen examines Western culture’s effort to deny apeiron, and the critical need now to lift the repression on apeiron for the sake of human individuation. “This groundbreaking book brings to fruition Rosen's reflexive theory of time and space. With recent physics breaking linear time symmetry, this unique integration of physics and philosophy is indeed timely.” —Eugene T. Gendlin, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Psychology, University of Chicago “Rosen's ideas are precisely stated, and he draws upon an impressive range of sources, both ancient and modern. The author shows the inadequacy of conventional thinking about space and time and argues persuasively for an intriguing new alternative. This important book may have radical implications for the conduct of science in the 21st century.” —Brian Josephson, Cambridge University Professor of Physics, Nobel Laureate Contents: List of Figures Jon MILLS: Foreword Preface Part One - Solve : The Flight from Apeiron ONE The Rise and Fall of Classical Space TWO The Crisis of Discontinuity in the Broader Culture Part Two - Coagula: The Return to Apeiron THREE Philosophical Precursors FOUR Apeiron and Being FIVE Topology Epilogue Works Cited About the Author Index ABOUT THE AUTHOR STEVEN M. ROSEN is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the College of Staten Island of the City University of New York. During his thirty years of teaching and research (1970–2000), he offered courses in both the Psychology and Philosophy Departments. Dr. Rosen currently resides in Vancouver, Canada, where he is actively pursuing interdisciplinary interests that include phenomenological ontology, the philosophy and poetics of science, Jungian thought, the gender question, ecological change, and cultural transformation. After receiving his Ph.D. in experimental psychology from the City University of New York in 1971, Rosen began to explore the foundations and frontiers of science, his work becoming interdisciplinary and philosophical in nature. He has lectured internationally, and his numerous essays have appeared in a variety of journals and books spanning the fields of philosophy, psychology, education, semiotics, ecology, and theoretical science. Rosen is author of Science, Paradox, and the Moebius Principle (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1994) and The Moebius Seed (Walpole, N.H.: Stillpoint Publications, 1985). Dr. Rosen is presently Research Associate and member of the Board of Directors of the Lifwynn Foundation for Social Research, an organization dedicated to carrying forward the work of the American social psychiatrist Trigant Burrow. Rosen is also on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Mind and Behavior, and has served as editorial consultant for such journals as Foundations of Physics and Man/Environment Systems, and for the State University of New York Press. FOREWORD Within the history of Western philosophy, the concepts of space and time have traditionally been privileged ontological categories that inform how we conceive of nature and mind, reason and science, self and society, and the lived quality of human experience. In this highly intriguing and perspicacious work, Steven M. Rosen explores the Greek notion of the apeiron—the boundless and unlimited, spaceless and timeless aspect of nature that must now be taken into account—within our postmodern world marked by radical plurality, destabilization, and disequilibrium that threaten individual well-being, cultural unity, and cosmic order. For the pre-Socratics, apeiron signified the principle of disharmony punctuated by chaotic multiplicity, thereby eclipsing any notion of the autonomous individual subject, a position reclaimed by postmodern currents today. Tracing the emergence of individuality from ancient mythic culture to modernity, the scientific revolution, and technological contemporary society, Rosen cogently shows how the crisis of individuation cannot be resolved without addressing the question and transmutation of space and time in light of apeiron. Rosen provides a robust and maverick rethinking of the space-time conundrum that draws on the developmental progression from ancient philosophy to alchemy, existentialism, physics, topology, and ontological phenomenology. The author succeeds admirably in recapitulating the call to Being as a phenomenological enterprise, namely, the realization of individuality through a concretization of abstraction that pays heed to apeiron. Dimensions of Apeiron is an original, highly thought-provoking, superb treatise on the lived experience of temporal embodiment within the disparate pluralities that define our collective social life. This book is destined to reshape our understanding of this elusive and paradoxical topic for generations to come. Jon Mills Editor Philosophy and Psychology EXCERPT Change itself changes. Over the last 150 years, it has assumed a qualitatively new, more emphatic form. The continuous orders of change that were characteristic of earlier times have given way to a thoroughgoing discontinuity, and this has affected virtually every sector of modern life: popular culture, art, literature, science, mathematics, the media, etc. (see Everdell, 1997). The gradual evolution of our social, political, and economic institutions has been disrupted by the onset of multiple crises that have thrown many of these systems into disarray. There has been a disintegration of family and church. The ethnic conflicts that rage around the world today reflect a destabilization of national identity. We have seen an alarming growth in international banditry and terrorism. World markets have reached new levels of erratic fluctuation. Nuclear weapons and waste are proliferating out of control....Thus it has gone. As a consequence of all this, “fragmentation is now very widespread, not only throughout society, but also in each individual” (Bohm, 1980, p. 1). Alberto Melucci observed accordingly that, given “the surging flux of events and relations…[t]he points of reference used by individuals and groups in the past to plot their life courses are disappearing” (1996, p. 2). Taken collectively, these cultural discontinuities constitute the crisis of postmodernity. Just what happened to precipitate the dilemma? Was it a particular event? Was it a set of events occurring in certain places at certain times that led us to this pass? I suggest that what happened was a transformation of our experience of space and time themselves. At bottom, it is the sense of space and time that began to be fragmented in the middle of the nineteenth century. The introduction of non-Euclidean geometry, the advent of Impressionist art, the Einsteinian revolution in physics (to give a few preliminary examples) all bear witness to the impending breakup of classical space. Along with this, “[o]ur experience of time undergoes increasing fragmentation....Linear time yields to an experience of transitions without development, to a movement between disconnected points, a sequence of fleeting moments” (Melucci, 1996, p. 9). The old sense of smoothly passing from past to present to future becomes a spasmodic leaping ahead into a boundless array of divergent possibilities. In short, the contemporary experience of space and time entails the “shock of discontinuity”—to cite John Berger’s and Jean Mohr’s (1982, p. 86) characterization of the shocking effects of photography that were especially evident when the medium was first conceived in 1839. Assuming that the mid-nineteenth century unsettlement of classical space and time has in fact contributed to our current state of turmoil in a significant way, how can we better understand it? What I will show in this book is that the nineteenth century watershed betokened the reappearance of an old nemesis. Western culture was forged from the struggle of human reason with the irrational forces of nature. To early Greek science and philosophy, nature in the wild is apeiron. This is the Greek word for what is “limitless,” “boundless,” or “indeterminate.” The apeiron is variously interpreted as “the unintelligible; the many; the moving; the ugly; the bad…the inchoate flux of opposites or contraries…the principle of disorder or disharmony” (Angeles, 1981, pp. 14–15). In its sheer boundlessness, apeiron defies containment within the ordering contexts of space and time. To the early Greeks, this posed a considerable challenge. For, in the unconstrained many of apeiron, there can be no one; in its chaotic multiplicity, there can be no unity, no stable center of identity, no indivisible core of being, no individual. So it seemed to the early Greeks. It was therefore imperative for them to tame apeiron, given the primary impulse that motivated their action. To paraphrase Protagoras, “man must be the measure of all things.” What this basically required was the ascendancy of the autonomous individual. More generally stated, from the outset Western culture has been spurred by the drive toward differentiated being or individuality, toward individuation. Achieving this end essentially has meant containing what at first appeared uncontainable: the boundless apeiron. The proposition I submit is that apeiron, after being held at bay for over two thousand years, has now returned with a vengeance. This, I suggest, is the dilemma that underlies postmodernity. The disruption of space and time, and, along with it, of all the “points of reference used by individuals and groups in the past to plot their life courses” (Melucci, 1996, p. 2), thus seems to point to a total unraveling of centuries of progress in human affairs. All that we have gained seems threatened; all seems on the verge of being lost. But appearances can be deceiving. What I intend to demonstrate in the chapters to follow is that the upsurgence of apeiron—far from indelibly spelling the demise of human individuality, actually offers us the opportunity to bring it to fruition.	Tijnmuiden 7 1046 AK Amsterdam The Netherlands T: +31-20-611 48 21 F: +31-20-447 29 79 248 East 44th Street - 2nd floor New York, NY 10017 USA T: 1-800-225-3998 F: 1-800-853-3881 Toll-free in the USA info@rodopi.nl