toposophy

English

Noun

toposophy (uncountable)

1. (ethnology) A branch of ethnology that emphasizes the relationship between people and the place in which they live or from which they come.
   • 2005, Mauro Peressini, Ratiba Hadj-Moussa, The Mediterranean Reconsidered:

     I hope it is clear by now that such networks of names signify not only the tracing of a mental map, but also the evocation of a sort of chorographic practice which results in the accumulation of immigrant capital or, as I mentioned above, place wisdom (toposophy).

   • 2014, Ullrich Kockel, “Towards an Ethnology Beyond Self, Other and Third: Toposophical Explorations”, in Tradicija ir dabartis, volume 9:

     Using a human ecological perspective, this essay argues for a reappraisal of indigeneity in a European context, drawing on an ethnology based on topography, topology and, fundamentally, toposophy to transcend the binary and trinary analytical confines of a world divided into Self, Other and, more recently also, Third.

   • 2016, Rudi Van Etteger, Design Principles and Guidelines: Bridging the Gap Between Science and Design:

     Toposophy is a perspective, allied to what Tim Ingold calls the dwelling perspective, which treats people as organisms immersed in their lifeworlds, as opposed to what he calls the building perspective, which supposes that “people inhabit a world – of culture or society – to which form and meaning have already been attached.

2. (philosophy) The idea that any intellectual subject can be treated as an independent topos which can be described and understood in purely mathematical terms.
   • 1986, Science-fiction Studies - Volume 13, page 250:

     His speculations on the "toposophy" of Superior Artificial Intelligences can be read as a materialistic version of theosophy — a theosophy without a teleology.

   • 2005, John L. Bell, “The development of categorical logic”, in Handbook of philosophical logic:

     The practice of topos theory quickly spawned an associated philosophy—jocularly known as “toposophy”— whose chief tenet is the idea that, like a model of set theory, any topos may be taken as a taken as an autonomous universe of discourse or “world” in which mathematical concepts can be interpreted and constructions performed.

   • 2012 -, Stanislaw Lem, Imaginary Magnitude, →ISBN, page 70:

     For just as Goedel's proof demonstrates the existence of such islands of mathematical truth, such archipelagoes as are separated from the continent of mathematics by a distance that cannot be traversed by any step-by-step progress, so toposophy demonstrates the existence of unknown forms of Intelligence which are separated from the continent of evolutionary labors by a distance which non step-by-step adaptation of genes can cross.

   • 2017, Klaas Landsman, Foundations of Quantum Theory:

     Quantum toposophy also accommodates the feeling that quantum mechanics is so radical that not just the actors of clasical mechanics, but its whole stage must be replaced.

3. (science fiction) A fictional science dealing with the theoretical problems and possibilities of attempts to extend and amplify one's mental potential, i.e. via technology, whether by humans, artificial intelligence or extraterrestrials.