Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-world (Studies in Continental Thought) by Casey, Edward S. 2nd (second) Revised Edition
What would the world be like if there were no places? Our lives are so place-oriented that we cannot begin to comprehend sheer placelessness. Indeed, the place we occupy has much to do with what and who we are. Yet, despite the pervasiveness of place in our everyday lives, philosophers have neglected it. "Getting Back into Place" offers a comprehensive and nuanced account of the role of place in human experience. Edward S. Casey first points to place's indispensability in navigation and orientation. The role of the lived body in matters of place is considered, and the characteristics of built places are explored. Cultivation of place is illuminated by a detailed analysis of gardens and parks. A scrutiny of wild places illustrates what is peculiar to places that resist the impingement of human presence. The contemporary, seminomadic experience of being between places is investigated through a sustained inquiry into the nature of journeys. Finally, the elusive meaning of home-places and of homecoming and homesteading is delineated. This rich intervention in the current discourse among scholars in the humanities and social sciences asserts the pervasiveness of place in constructing culture and identity.
Professor Edward Casey was the president of the American Philosophical Association (Eastern Division) from 2009-10, and he was chairman of the Philosophy Department at Stony Brook University for a decade. He works in aesthetics, philosophy of space and time, ethics, perception, and psychoanalytic theory. He obtained his doctorate at Northwestern University in 1967 and has taught at Yale University, the University of California at Santa Barbara, The New School for Social Research, Emory University, and several other institutions. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University.
His recent research includes investigations into place and space; landscape painting and maps as modes of representation; ethics and the other; feeling and emotion; philosophy of perception (with special attention to the role of the glance); the nature of edges.