Per’s Reviews > The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History > Status Update

Yet just as place emerges in the Cartesian abyss between consciousness and body, so it rises, Phoenixlike, from the ashes of metaphysical thought as deconstructed by Heidegger. Thanks to such features as gathering and nearness, place becomes for him the very scene of Being's disclosure and of the openness of the Open in which truth is unconcealed.

by the seventeenth century place is largely discredited, hidden deeply in the folds of the all-comprehensive fabric of space. This occurs in the work of absolutists such as Gassendi and Newton as well as of relativists such as Locke and Leibniz [...] each of these figures would assent, albeit with certain reservations, to William Gilbert's stern judgment at midcentury: "There can be no place whatsoever in nature."

From Archytas's challenging conundrum we can derive a more momentous question: not whether an outstretched hand or staff can reach out into something (or nothing) but whether the whole world (i.e., the physical cosmos as one entity) can move. And if the world moves, in what, into what, does it move?

Infinite space is space for (motion) and space without (bounds) [...] such space brings together two of the most ancient terms in Greek philosophy, attributable to Plato and Anaximander, respectively: "room" and the "boundless". Their conjunction, which is conceptual as well as historical, suggests that if the cosmos indeed has a place, it is a place in space: space at once endlessly voluminous and boundaryless.

As I watch television or correspond by e-mail, my immediate surroundings may not matter greatly to the extent that I am drawn into the drama I am watching or into the words I am typing or reading. But a new sense of place emerges from this very circumstance: "virtual place," as it can be called, in keeping with current discussions of "virtual reality."