The last few weeks have been filled with travel. After my semester in China ended, I went on a two week tour of China with my father, where we visited Beijing, Xian, Zhengzhou, and Shanghai. After that, I flew back to Washington DC, stopping first at Chicago to go through Customs before catching our next plane. And just a couple days ago I drove with my mother down to Blacksburg, VA to visit my little sister. All told, I traveled approximately 9,913 miles.
Travelling has many impacts on individuals. When you move from one place to another, the sounds, smells, and sights you tend to come across change, which can contribute to one’s emotional state (e.g. feeling out of place or refreshed). The very act of being in motion can lead to feelings of excitement or nausea. And, of course, the industry of travel has its own pros and cons (the new foods and facilities can be enjoyable but also pricy, for example). There are also interesting questions about how traveling alters philosophies and cultural practices. Here are some papers that look at how people, objects, and philosophies change (or have changed) from moving from one place to another.
- Kristie Miller and Michael Duncan, “Modal Persistence and Modal Travel,” Ratio, September 2015.
- Philip Gerrans and Jeanette Kennett, “Mental Time Travel, Dynamic Evaluation, and Moral Agency,” Mind, January 2017.
- Shaun Regan, “Peripatetic philosophy: Sterne and cosmopolitanism,” Textual Practice, March 2017.
- Srboljub Dimitrijević, “A Possible Positioning of the Road Philosophy will Travel,” Facta Universitatis: Series Philosophy, Sociology, Psychology & History, 2012.
- Oana Cogeanu, “Travelling Ideologies: A Story of Whiteness,” Linguaculture, December 2015.
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