Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography

by Jeff E. Malpas

While the "sense of place" is a familiar theme in poetry and art, philosophers have generally given little or no attention to place and the human relation to place. Jeff Malpas seeks to remedy this by advancing an account of the nature and significance of place as a complex but unitary structure that encompasses self and other, space and time, subjectivity and objectivity. He argues that our relation to place derives from the very nature of human thought, experience and identity as established in and through place.

Genres: Philosophy, Geography

218 pages, Hardcover

First published June 28, 1999

About the author

Jeff Malpas is Distinguished Professor at the University of Tasmania and Distinguished Visiting Professor at Latrobe University. He is the author of Heidegger's Topology: Being, Place, World and Heidegger and the Thinking of Place: Explorations in the Topology of Being, both published by the MIT Press.

Reviews

[Abigail · Rating 3 out of 5]

J.E. Malpas explores "Proust's Principle" of "the place-bound identity of persons" in this academic and philosophical study of the connections between humans and human culture on the one hand, and place and space on the other. As humans are physical beings, he argues that "place is integral to the very structure and possibility of experience," and he draws upon multiple disciplines and genres, in his exploration of the idea...

Here is another book, much like John Wylie's 2007 Landscape , that I might never have picked up, had I not been writing a paper for my children's literature masters, on the use and significance of place and landscape in two children's novels - Eilís Dillon's The Island of Ghosts and Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island . Malpas' book is definitely outside of the areas of study with which I normally concern myself, and it didn't end up being that germane to my work, as I decided to use the topos idea, found in Jane Suzanne Carroll's Landscape in Children's Literature , in the aforementioned paper. That said, I did find it interesting, if for no other reason than it made me think about place and space in ways I had not hitherto. I have not read a number of the philosophers the author quotes, but that did not detract from the sense of Malpas' argument in any significant way. This is a rather specialized book, and probably will not have much interest outside of certain academic circles. Recommended largely to those readers interested in the academic study of the idea of place.

[Andrew]

A difficult, demanding read that draws heavily on philosophers I've never read (Strawson, Davidson) with the noble goal of fixing the philosophical endeavor in space. As impressed as I am with Malpas' efforts and rigor, I so often find that works like this-- works which so emphasize the role of ontology versus that of epistemology-- to be utterly alienating, and it's like there's a little [angel or devil, not sure which] on my shoulder whispering "you know it's all bullshit and nothing means anything, don't you?"

[Mon · Rating 4 out of 5]

More philosophy than architecture, but if you're looking for a more theoretical argument for an insane unpractical gravity defying design it might just work. Malpas is better at criticising the contradiction of allocentric and egocentric space of other theorists than coming up with his own original idea. There is a copious amount of quotes and literary discussion of Proust and architecture - what's not to like?