Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: the influence of place
- 1 The obscurity of place
- 2 The structure of spatiality
- 3 Holism, content and self
- 4 Unity, locality and agency
- 5 Agency and objectivity
- 6 Self and the space of others
- 7 The unity and complexity of place
- 8 Place, past and person
- Conclusion: the place of philosophy
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - The obscurity of place
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: the influence of place
- 1 The obscurity of place
- 2 The structure of spatiality
- 3 Holism, content and self
- 4 Unity, locality and agency
- 5 Agency and objectivity
- 6 Self and the space of others
- 7 The unity and complexity of place
- 8 Place, past and person
- Conclusion: the place of philosophy
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
If two different authors use the words ‘red’, ‘hard’, or ‘disappointed’, no one doubts that they mean approximately the same thing … But in the case of words such as ‘place’ or ‘space’, whose relationship with psychological experience is less direct, there exists a far-reaching uncertainty of interpretation.
Albert Einstein, Foreword to Concepts of SpaceIt is something of a truism to say that that which is closest and most familiar to us is often that which is most easily overlooked and forgotten. Nevertheless, the material that was surveyed in the preceding introduction provides good evidence of the way in which place, familiar and ubiquitous though it may be, is seldom entirely neglected. And, while there are relatively few philosophical treatments of place that take up the concept as philosophically significant in its own right, this is indicative, not merely of a certain marginalisation or forgetting of place within philosophy, but of the very opacity of the notion itself.
Certainly, many of the discussions of place in the existing literature suggest that the notion is not at all clearly defined. Concepts of place are often not distinguished at all from notions of simple physical location, while sometimes discussions that seem implicitly to call upon notions of place refer explicitly only to a narrower concept of space.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Place and ExperienceA Philosophical Topography, pp. 19 - 43Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999