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. In Place and Experience, 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. Drawing on a range of sources from Proust (...) and Wordsworth to Davidson, Strawson and Heidegger, he argues that the significance of place is not to be found in our experience of place so much as in the grounding of experience in place, and that this binding to place is not a contingent feature of human existence, but derives from the very nature of human thought, experience and identity as established in and through place. (shrink)

The publication of the revised edition of Jeff Malpas’s Place and Experience in 2018 gives the opportunity to reconsider this book (originally published in 1999) and the debates that it originally sparked. In this article, I focus on Malpas’s characterization of space as subjective, allocentric, and objective and I approach them in conjunction with other notions and considerations that, I suggest, are useful to expand and complement Malpas’s central theses. I approach the concept of subjective space in conjunction (...) with the notion of coenaesthesis and with Heidegger’s notion of mineness (Jemeinigkeit); the concept of allocentric space by addressing Malpas’s critique of Nagel’s notion of detachment; and the concept of objective space through a discussion of the issue of perspective in light of Merleau-Ponty’s critique of Leibniz’s notion of ‘géométral’ (geometrized projection). These analyses pave the way for a discussion of some possible normative implications of the conception of place and subjectivity that emerges from Malpas’s Place and Experience against the background of Heidegger’s thought, and particularly in relation to Heidegger’s notion of dwelling (Wohnen). (shrink)

This book’s subtitle usefully indicates the kind of project its author is engaged in in its pages. The conception of a “philosophical topography” is drawn directly from the preface of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Along with brief concluding reflections on the role of “place” in philosophy, J. E. Malpas offers eight chapters of exploration of the interrelations of concepts, and realities, of space, time, place, self, agency, embodiment, and world. The book is clearly written, interesting, and unusually synoptic in (...) its sources, guiding ideas, and scope. It is a member of a growing body of attractively ecumenical work in recent philosophy, bringing into creative conjunction insights and approaches from both analytic and continental writers and perspectives. Malpas presents himself as, one might say, a Heideggerian Davidsonian. Other presences are evident: Strawson, Wittgenstein, Gareth Evans, Merleau-Ponty, Bergson, John Campbell, Edward Casey, Kant. So too is engagement with literary articulations of concern with place in human life, in Proust, Wordsworth, and other writers, especially antipodean ones; and involvement as well with philosophical geographers who have had things to say about place. (shrink)

(2001). J.E. Malpas's Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography (Cambridge University Press, 1999) Converging and diverging in/on place. Philosophy & Geography: Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 225-230.

While the presence or absence of consciousness plays the central role in the moral/ethical decisions when dealing with patients with disorders of consciousness (DOC), recently it is criticized as not adequate due to number of reasons, among which are the lack of the uniform definition of consciousness and consequently uncertainty of diagnostic criteria for it, as well as irrelevance of some forms of consciousness for determining a patient’s interests and wishes. In her article, Dr. Specker Sullivan reexamined the meaning of (...) consciousness in the DOC taxonomy and proposed to go away from the routinely used clinical definition of consciousness as “wakeful awareness”, and adopt the meaning that is common in the Eastern tradition which is a form of “pure experience” (Specker Sullivan 2018). She further argued that understanding consciousness as a “pure experience” is ethically relevant for DOC patients. This suggestion is original, novel and important since it preserves the importance of the notion of consciousness for the clinical practice while simultaneously offering an additional ethical tool for the moral decisions in medicine. At the same time, without placing such Eastern notion in the Western tradition it is difficult to see how pure experience could be usefully operationalized to make sense in the clinical practice with DOC patients. It is so because pure experience is a subjective phenomenon which is completely inaccessible in noncommunicative DOC patients and also it does not express behaviorally (Monti et al 2010), therefore some objective-like operationalization is needed. This is why the fusion of Eastern and Western traditions is required to gain the full potential of Dr. Specker Sullivan’s suggestion. We propose that such fusion could be achieved on the basis of the Operational Architectonics (OA) theory of brain-mind functioning (Fingelkurts et al. 2010; 2013a) which suits ideally the purpose due its compatibility with both Western and Eastern traditions of consciousness. (shrink)

Jeff Malpas’ book Experience and Place has become a significant landmark in philosophy. I take the publication of the revised and extended second edition of the book in 2018 as an opportunity to re...

This is an ambitious work that attempts to elucidate the nature of place and the way in which we are, in part, at least, constituted by and complexly embedded within it. The central claim of the book is that “place is integral to the very structure and possibility of experience”, where experience is understood in a broad sense that is not restricted to perception but also includes thought and action. More generally, “place is... that within (...) which and with respect to which subjectivity itself is established”. These philosophical ideas are further illuminated in chapters 7 and 8 by way of a discussion of George Poulet’s reading of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and of works by Sally Morgan, William Faulkner, Bruce Mason, Wordsworth, and John Clare. Overall the inquiry is meant to lead us to see that place is the ground of Heideggerian “being-in-the-world.”. (shrink)

This study aimed to explore postgraduate students’ lived experiences of managing research ethics committee processes. Whilst there is a wide range of research that explores ethics principles/guidan...

The article is an attempt to make sense of the different interdisciplinary perspectives associated with people’s attachment to places with a view to construct a holistic template for understanding people-place relationships and experiences. The author took note of the theoretical contributions of Jorgensen & Stedman, Scannell & Gifford, and Seamon to construct an integrative framework for understanding emotional links to places and people’s perception and experience of places. This was done with the intention of illuminating the meaning of (...) place and the different “places” people get attached to. The paper concludes by incorporating different place frameworks with the intention of establishing a holistic model for understanding the various attributes and perceptions of people-place relationships and experiences. (shrink)

Do places matter educationally? When Edward Casey remarks: ‘The world is, minimally and forever, a place‐world’, we might take this statement as presupposing without argument that places exist as a given, that we know what a place is, a point that Aristotle would have never taken for granted and in fact neither does Casey. I find Casey's remark that we live in ‘a place‐world’ an immensely rich turn of phrase, forever packed with an infinite and diverse range (...) of landscapes reflecting our being in the world, a maze of wonders, an orchestra of different subtle sounds where places are witnessed, mimicked and created. We submerge ourselves in the gamesome labour of place and learn to perceive and quiver in its light. I will discuss through a phenomenological perspective the self‐givenness of place experience, the unfolding of a life that is an aspect of one's own space and horizon. The relationship between place and being and the aesthetic way that I discuss this is central to this paper's analysis, a position that is at odds with those who favour a more macro theoretical perspective that eclipses place. My analysis focuses on a philosophical exploration of being‐in‐place, where place becomes being. Much is made of the thought that place is primarily an aesthetically lived experience where we create ourselves. An attempt is made to show how an embodied sense of being in place transforms places of learning. The paper attempts to acknowledge the kind of governing power of being that place interconnections can enclose, personalize and create. (shrink)

Diego Bubbio, Ingo Farin and Glenda Satne have advanced a range of comments, questions and challenges relating to the ideas and arguments set out in the new edition of my Place and Experience (2018). Rather than address each of my interlocutors separately, my responses here are organized around four main topics: the relation between space and place, including the nature of space; the relation between place and subjectivity, and the foundational role of place; the relation (...) between place and conceptuality; and the relation between place and normativity. (shrink)

It is argued that conceptual analysis as practiced by the philosophers of ordinary language, is an empirical procedure that relies on a version of Garfinkel's ethnomethodological experiment. The ethnomethodological experiment is presented as a procedure in which the existence and nature of a social norm is demonstrated by flouting the putative convention and observing what reaction that produces in the social group within which the convention is assumed to operate. Examples are given of the use of ethnomethodological experiments, both in (...) vivo and as a thought experiment, in order to demonstrate the existence of otherwise invisible conventions governing human social behavior. Comparable examples are cited from the writings of ordinary language philosophers of ethnomethodological thought experiments designed to demonstrate the existence of linguistic conventions. (shrink)

Ullin Thomas Place died on 2nd January 2000 at the age of seventy-five. I had met him a little over three years earlier, in November 1996, during the annual 'Mind and Brain' symposium organized by Peter Fenwick and held at the Institute of Psychiatry in London. At that meeting Professor Place delivered a slightly shortened version of the paper reproduced here, in which he told his personal story — a pilgrim's progress? — recounting, as he put it, 'the (...) history of a thought process leading from an adolescent interest in mystical experience to an article entitled‘Is consciousness a brain process?’[Place, 1956] in which I argued for an affirmative answer to that question'. (shrink)

Labyrinths have held the fascination of people since ancient times. Although walking a labyrinth can simply be an interesting recreation, it has increasingly been seen as an intentional tool for personal or spiritual growth. Religious and spiritual experience is generally understood to be a product of the kinds of evidence given within the experience as well as the person’s cognitive and emotional attributions. This article offers a phenomenological perspective which identifies a set of critical elements in the generation (...) of the person’s experience. These include the individual narrative of the participant, the place narrative of the labyrinth, the geometric structure of the place, and the person’s internal and behavioral practice within the place. Through the exploration of each of these elements and their interactions, it is shown that the potential for personal and spiritual experience when walking the labyrinth is related to several processes. The first is simply the walker’s ongoing intentional participation in the experience. The second is the interaction between the place narrative and the individual’s narrative, particularly as it relates to the person’s relevant concern. This interaction affects the person’s expectations and attributions during and after the experience. Two final processes, however, the individual practice and the place geometry, create the evidentiary basis for the labyrinth’s deepest experiences. The embodied, cognitive, and emotional resolution of the unexpected dynamic uncertainty regarding place, movement, and outcome created by the geometric and informational nature of labyrinths, can prove experientially potent. (shrink)

This is a philological and critical analysis of two crucial philosophical concepts, viz., reaso and experienceâ. The study shows that, though there is no word in Sanskrit which may be taken as equivalent of Western reason and thought, such terms as tarka, yukti, nyaya, anumana, buddhi, etc., clearly capture parts or aspects of what is meant by reason and thought (Denken). Moreover, it is misleading to trans- late sruti as revelation. Construing sruti as revelation surreptitiously imports a Semitic theological concept (...) into the Vedic tradition. The case of experience is more promising because we have such Sanskrit words as anubhava or anubhuti that do translate into experience. However, experience in Western thought has acquired many shades of meaning, and the study determines in what sense the Indian anubhava captures the Western experience. Finally, the book demonstrates that Indian philosophy provides an account of the cognitive process that begins with perception and culminates in wisdom (highest experience). This whole process may be called reason, at both ends of which we can talk of experience, which places experience not in an external opposition to reason, but rather as something that belongs to it internally. Thus, the modern Western opposition between reason and experience collapses and the two toge-ther yield an integrated process of acquisition, validation, and practical application of knowledge. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper discusses the place and significance of comparative trials in German agricultural writings around 1800. In the second half of the eighteenth century, practitioners of agriculture began to discuss the role and design of agricultural trials. The notion of comparative experimentation played a significant role in these discussions, but it could mean quite different things: comparative assessment of treatments in terms of yield, cost-effectiveness, and adequacy for an intended purpose; comparative input variations to explore the multitude of (...) effects of certain causes; and the comparison of something treated with something untreated, to establish the effects of a treatment more securely. Some German agriculturists developed their methodologies explicitly in contrast to the laboratory experiment, as they conceived it. Others invoked systematic variations and practices of quality control that they imported from technological contexts. Yet others drew on philosophical discussions of cause–effect relations. (shrink)

Rather than opposing hermeneutics and pragmatism, this contribution, without denying their differences, aims to lay the foundations of a pragmatist hermeneutics by taking the relationship between meaning and experience as a common thread. The challenge is to analyze this relationship from three distinct angles: immediate experience (and spontaneous understanding), acquired experience (and pre-understanding) and creative experience (and interpretation). From each of these perspectives, the aim is to grant a meaningful place to non-verbal – and specifically (...) bodily – experience, which calls for a somahermeneutics. (shrink)

This paper explores the difference between the notions of place and placedness. This difference relates to an important point of differentiation between genuinely a topographical approach and those other approaches that tend to dominate in the existing literature, including approaches associated with ‘situated cognition’. If place is taken as the primary concept, as I argue it should be taken, then that means that being-placed, as it might be viewed as determinative of experience and cognition, has first to (...) be understood in relation to place. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that the relationship between place and self can be accounted for by recent theoretical work on autobiographical memory. The link between place and self is conceptualized as a transitory mental representation that emerges as a “place of mine” (personal autobiographical experience) from a “place” (declarative knowledge). The function of “place of mine” is to guide personal memory and self-knowing consciousness of periods of our lives. I combine inquiries of memory, (...) self, and place in a triadic relationship, a synthesis, suggesting a conceptual model for the phenomenon of place-related self as a sub-system of the self. This is formed by a causal progression from a physical place across time via emotional and cognitive bonds, components of the autobiographical information grounding the self, apportioned across declarative memory. Finally, using the methods of factor analysis and structural equation modeling, I show that the proposed model accounts for previous and new data on place-related identity. (shrink)

As interpreted here, Garfinkel's "ethnomethodological experiment" (1967) demonstrates the existence of a social convention by flouting it and observing the consternation and aversive consequences for the perpetrator which that provokes. I suggest that the hostility which behaviorism has provoked throughout its history is evidence that it flouts an important social convention, the convention that, whenever possible, human beings are treated as and must always give the appearance of being rational agents. For these purposes, a rational agent is someone whose behavior (...) is controlled by a logically consistent body of means-end beliefs ("rules" in Skinner's terminology) and complementing desires which between them provide a basis for predicting how the individual will behave and for suggesting what arguments will persuade the agent to modify his or her beliefs and the behavior based upon them. The behaviorist flouts this convention by suggesting that its fictional character makes it unsuitable for the purposes of scientific explanation of behavior. The hostility that this suggestion provokes is evidence of the importance attached by the verbal community both to preserving a consistent and rational connection between what is said and what is done and presenting it as part of the natural order of things. (shrink)

It is sometimes said that contemporary pragmatists place too much emphasis on language and not enough on experience. This objection might hold for the pragmatism of Richard Rorty and his students, but it does not hold for the pragmatism of C. S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. I shall argue that we should return to the classical pragmatists and their truth-and-experience position. Indeed, an important insight at the very heart of pragmatism is that language and (...) class='Hi'>experience cannot be pulled apart. (shrink)

This study examines the first two years of a tactical innovation that emerged in 2012 in Egypt, which involved activist groups organizing patrol-type "intervention teams" to combat sexual violence against women in public spaces. Findings reveal that the new tactic took different forms in the two places in which it was deployed, even though the same actors employed it. I argue that the place in which a new tactic emerges shapes the form it takes. When coming up with a (...) new collective action tactic, activists elaborate visions about how to carry out their actions based on their collective identities and taste in tactics. But as they start experimenting with the new tactic on the ground, they learn about the places' material affordances, symbolic valence, and power relations, as well as the constraints and opportunities that they represent. The material properties of places shape activists' possibilities of movement, patterns of communication, field of vision, and capacity to escape repression or reach safe spaces. The configuration of actors in a place shapes the nature of their interactions with others on the ground, possible alliances, and sources of conflict. The symbolic meanings of places shape the resonance of a group’s actions and the degree of resistance that actors face. Place in part determines the ability of activists to develop a tactic in the form that best fits their preferences. (shrink)

This paper explicates how we might positively understand the distinctive, nonconceptual experience of our own actions and experiences by drawing on insights from a radically enactive take on phenomenal experience. We defend a late-developing relationalism about the emergence of explicit, conceptually based self-awareness, proposing that the latter develops in tandem with the mastery of self-reflective narrative practices. Focusing on the case of human newborns, Sect. 1 reviews and rejects claims that the capacities of actors to keep track of (...) aspects of themselves—e.g. their bodies, body parts, movements, activities, actions and experiences—when coordinating what they do equates to or is best explained by positing minimal, tacit awareness of their experiences as their own. Section 2 then considers and resists more familiar arguments, based on the so-called reflexivity thesis, that take such minimal self-awareness to be implied wherever there is any kind of phenomenal experience. In place of these ideas, we promote an alternative proposal of what is involved when agents keep track of aspects of themselves, drawing on a radically enactive conception of basic experience. Section 3 concludes by proposing that our first conceptual, explicit sense of self is something that only arrives on the scene once we become able to hold our own—through the support of others—in discursive, narrative practices that give us a conceptual grip on what it is to be a temporally extended self that persists over time. (shrink)

Anne-Lise Rey’s account of Maupertuis’s physical theology challenges the efforts on the part of commentators to align his work with Newton, Leibniz, or critics of Leibniz by examining the innovative epistemological principles that inform his Essay on Cosmology (1750). Through an analysis of his proofs of the existence of God in this work, she investigates Maupertuis’s view on how we can obtain certain knowledge of nature and the place he affords to experimentation and contingency in this regard. Rey claims (...) that Maupertuis, despite his hostility toward Descartes, Leibniz, and Wolff, did not abolish the idea of a metaphysics of nature per se, but tried to strike a new balance between, on the one hand, the deduction of laws from the nature of bodies and, on the other hand, experimentation. More specifically, she argues that Maupertuis in the Essay on Cosmology affirms our epistemic incapacity to grasp the whole system of nature and, hence, argues that the probable truths we can obtain in physics by means of experiments are superior to the geometrical truths that Descartes and his followers aimed to establish in both physics and metaphysics. (shrink)

The intersection of philosophies of space and technology is a fecund area of inquiry that has received surprisingly little attention in the philosophical literature. While the major accounts of space and place have not considered complexities introduced by recent technological developments, scholarship on the human-technology relationship has virtually ignored the spatial dimensions of this interaction. Place and Digital Space takes a step in addressing this gap in literature by offering an original, phenomenological account of place and using (...) this framework to analyze digitally mediated spaces. I argue that places are continually evolving, internally heterogenous, and spatially distinct meaningful wholes with indeterminate boundaries. I then show how spaces mediated by digital technologies, particularly augmented reality (AR), are fundamentally different from ordinary places. The increasing use of AR, I argue, poses an unprecedented challenge to the way we interpret, engage with, and have collective experiences of everyday places. Finally, I identify ethical questions raised by the interpretation of spaces by artificial intelligence, by the unauthorized augmentation of places, and by the possibility of a few companies with big data dominating the virtual modifications of public places. (shrink)

This article develops a characterization of the postmodern subject having as pre-text the film Lost in Translation by Sofia Coppola. To accomplish this goal, the essay links the semiotics of passion and the role of discursive manifestation in the construction of place through the recognition of the “sensitive body” while creating a cinematic experience. This experience transforms the urban space in a lived city and makes possible the encounter with the other and with the self. During the (...) passional journey, contemporary subjectivity displays through sensitive dimensions that are to be interpreted through non-verbal semiotics; and paradise becomes the poetic habitation of the lived space. (shrink)

This essay claims that heterotopia is characteristic of post-Apartheid South Africa, i.e. where heterotopia is usually the exception in society, it is the norm in South Africa. This claim reinterprets and expands Foucault’s concept: heterotopia here refers to the racialization of place and space, and hence to otherness and difference as primary. The ubiquity of heterotopia post-Apartheid is evident in the life-worlds of white suburbia and the black township. A case study is undertaken of white suburbia through a series (...) of phenomenological descriptions of contemporary South Africa using heterotopia as a heuristic tool. This study demonstrates how Foucault’s notion of heterotopia is relevant but also too narrow when related to the postcolonial context. An expanded notion of the term as denoting a racialized experience of space and place is necessary for the purposes of coming to terms with the strangeness of post-Apartheid South Africa, where contradiction and otherness are the norm rather than the exception. (shrink)

In this article, I clarify the phenomenological concept of lifeworld by drawing on the geographical themes of place, place experience, and place meaning. Most simply, lifeworld refers to a person or group’s day-to-day, taken-for-granted experience that typically goes unnoticed. One aim of phenomenological research is to examine the lifeworld as a means to identify and clarify the tacit, unnoticed aspects of human life so that they can be accounted for theoretically and practically. Here, I discuss (...) some key phenomenological principles and then draw on phenomenological renditions of place as one means to clarify some of the lifeworld’s social, environmental, spatial, and geographical aspects. To concretize my discussion, I draw descriptive evidence from British writer Penelope Lively’s Spiderweb, a 1990s novel describing one outsider’s efforts to come to inhabit a place—a fictitious present-day village in the southwestern British county of Somerset. -/- . (shrink)

Much has been written about the history of the work of men and women in the premodern past. It is now generally acknowledged that early modern ideological assumptions about a strict division of work and space between men and productive work outside the house on the one hand, and women and reproduction and consumption inside the house, on the other, bore little relation to reality. Household work strategies, out of necessity, were diverse. Yet what this spatial complexity meant in particular (...) households on a day-to-day basis and its consequences for gender relationships is less clear and has received relatively little historical attention. The aim of this paper is to add to our knowledge through a case study of the way that men and women used and organized space for work in the county of Essex during the “long seventeenth century”. Drawing on critiques of the concept of “separate spheres” and the models of economic change to which it relates, together with local/micro historical methods, it places evidence within an appropriate regional context to argue that spatial patterns were enormously varied in early modern England and a number of factors—time, place, occupation, and status, as well as gender—determined them. Understanding of the dynamic, complex, uneven purchase of patriarchy upon the organization, imagination, and experience of space has important implications for approaches to gender relations in early modern England. It raises additional doubts about the utility of the separate spheres analogy, and particularly the use of binary oppositions of male/female and public/private, to describe gender relations and their changes in this period and shows that a deeper understanding demands more research into the local contexts in which the gendered division and meaning of work was negotiated. (shrink)

The following paper aims to explore the plausibility of considering movement and place part of the conventionality of social life and interactions from an ethnomethodological point of view and asks whether there is a conventionality to the very distinction between actions being ‘mobile’ and/or ‘inert’—if we can speak of this as, at least in part, conventional, then we can further ask, whether this conventionality plays a part in the social construction of space and the socio-spatial order more generally. After (...) arriving at this question by looking at Giddens and Garfinkel, the paper differentiates four types of movement: drifting, circling, mobility, and circulating. The latter is then used to show how a key aspect of social order is not simply experience of being ‘enclosed’ by a boundary or division of space, but that instead, most of the time, spatial order is simply taken for granted and movement is experienced and neither ‘here’ nor ‘there’. Circulation, then, helps us to account for our ability to move within a place without necessarily having to leave it. Circulation describes the process of accomplishing the interiority of a place and the paper will claim that this is achieved by glossing over particular borders and boundaries as we traverse space. (shrink)

Strange gift from the Lord. It was the fact that I, a young Ukrainian born in Belgium, lived in Rome in this very home, like Patriarch Joseph, and talked repeatedly with him. There was more, I was in particular with Boris, now the bishop of the UGCC of Paris.I want you to understand that the context is not easy. The question is: who is the patriarch, and who is Dimid or even Gudziak? The patriarch was born 125 years ago, and (...) I - 57 years ago. This means that I am now and now 68 years younger than him. Not to mention the experience, the san, about the power. (shrink)

This is a book about space. On a first level, it reflects traditional Japanese ideas of space against various "items" of Western culture. Among these items are Bakhtin's "dialogicity", Wittgenstein's Lebensform, and "virtual space" or "globalized" space as representatives of the latest development of an "alienated", modern spatial experience. Some of the Western concepts of space appear as negative counter examples to "basho-like", Japanese places; others turn out to be compatible with the Japanese idea of space. On a second (...) level, the book attempts to synthesize, by constantly transgressing the limits of a purely comparative activity, a quantity which the author believes to be existent in Japanese culture that is called "the virtual". Be it Kuki Shûzô's hermeneutics of non-foundation or his ontology of dream, Nishida Kitarô's virtual definition of the body of state, or Kimura Bin's notion of "in-between" (aida) that is so closely associated with the "virtual space" of Noh plays: what all these conceptions have in common is that they aim to transcend a flat notion of "reality" by developing "the virtual" as a complex ontological unity. (shrink)

How do pictures represent? In this book Robert Hopkins casts new light on an ancient question by connecting it to issues in the philosophies of mind and perception. He starts by describing several striking features of picturing that demand explanation. These features strongly suggest that our experience of pictures is central to the way they represent, and Hopkins characterizes that experience as one of resemblance in a particular respect. He deals convincingly with the objections traditionally assumed to be (...) fatal to resemblance views, and shows how his own account is uniquely well placed to explain picturing's key features. His discussion engages in detail with issues concerning perception in general, including how to describe phenomena that have long puzzled philosophers and psychologists, and the book concludes with an attempt to see what a proper understanding of picturing can tell us about that deeply mysterious phenomenon, the visual imagination. (shrink)

The publication of the revised edition of Place and Experience provides the occasion to discuss Malpas’ original account of place, and its role in a proper account of the central features of human minds. The first edition is a groundbreaking work on the embodiment and embeddedness of human minds, that prefigures more recent developments of a now established field of research on embodied minds: so-called E accounts. In this paper, I address three issues in Malpas’ book that (...) I found problematic at times and unclear at others, and argue that E- accounts, or better, a particular rendering of them, can better dissolve. These interrelated issues are: 1. the use of the idea of mental representations to understand location and orientation; 2. the claim that non-human animals have ‘environments’ but lack ‘worlds’, 3. the use of two exclusive vocabularies, the physical and the mental, for describing cognition. I thus question such ideas, associated with traditional accounts of cognition, which not only are responsible for some of the gravest criticisms such accounts have received, but seem inadequate to Malpas’ characterization of minds as placed. My recommendation is to take a step back from the traditional framework, and allow ourselves to simply move forward. (shrink)

... the topic of 'meaning' is the one topic discussed in philosophy in which there is literally nothing but 'theory' - literally nothing that can be labelled or even ridiculed as the 'common sense view'. Putnam, 'The Meaning of Meaning' This book explores some truths behind the truism that experimentation is a hallmark of scientific activity. Scientists' descriptions of nature result from two sorts of encounter: they interact with each other and with nature. Philosophy of science has, by and large, (...) failed to give an account of either sort of interaction. Philosophers typically imagine that scientists observe, theorize and experiment in order to produce general knowledge of natural laws, knowledge which can be applied to generate new theories and technologies. This view bifurcates the scientist's world into an empirical world of pre-articulate experience and know how and another world of talk, thought and argument. Most received philosophies of science focus so exclusively on the literary world of representations that they cannot begin to address the philosophical problems arising from the interaction of these worlds: empirical access as a source of knowledge, meaning and reference, and of course, realism. This has placed the epistemological burden entirely on the predictive role of experiment because, it is argued, testing predictions is all that could show that scientists' theorizing is constrained by nature. Here a purely literary approach contributes to its own demise. The epistemological significance of experiment turns out to be a theoretical matter: cruciality depends on argument, not experiment. (shrink)

Thought, Reference, and Experience is a collection of important new essays on topics at the intersection of philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and philosophical logic. The starting-point for the papers is the brilliant work of the British philosopher Gareth Evans before his untimely death in 1980 at the age of 34. Evans's work on reference and singular thought transformed the Fregean approach to the philosophy of thought and language, showing how seemingly technical issues in philosophical semantics are inextricably (...) linked to fundamental questions about the structure of our thinking about ourselves and about the world. The papers, all newly written for this volume, explore different aspects of Evans's philosophical legacy, showing its importance to central areas in contemporary analytic philosophy. The volume includes a substantial introduction that introduces the principal themes in Evans's thought and places the papers in context. (shrink)

Examines the place of rhetoric in John Locke's political and philosophical thought. Traces the close ties between rhetoric and experience as they form the basis for a theory and practice of judgment at the center of his work"--Provided by publisher.

Engaging Polanyi’s embeddedness–disembeddedness framework, this study explored the work experiences of Bhil children employed in Indian Bt cottonseed GPNs. The innovative visual technique of drawings followed by interviews was used. Migrant children, working under debt bondage, underwent greater exploitation and perennial and severe depersonalized bullying, indicative of commodification of labour and disembeddedness. In contrast, children working in their home villages were not under debt bondage and underwent less exploitation and occasional and mild depersonalized bullying, indicative of how civil society organizations, (...) along with the state, attempt to re-embed economic activities in the social context. Polanyi’s double movement was evident. ‘Place’ emerged as the pivotal factor determining children’s experiences. A ‘protective alliance’ of community controls and social power, associated with in-group affiliations and cohesive ties, stemming from a common village and tribal identity, aided children working at home for Bhil farmers. ‘Asymmetric intergroup inequality’ due to pronounced social identity and class differences, coupled with locational constraints and developmental disadvantage, made migrant children vulnerable targets. Social embeddedness influences how child workers are treated because it forces employers to be ethical and not engage in bullying. However, by shifting production to children’s home villages, there is an attempt to obscure the difference between child labour and child work. Thus, the seeds of disembeddedness are sown through the very act of re-embeddeding, potentially hampering future interventions. (shrink)

Skinner has repeatedly asserted that he does not deny either the existence of private events or the possibility of studying them scientifically. But he has never explained how his position in this respect differs from that of the mentalist or provided a practical methodology for the investigation of private events within a radical behaviorist perspective. With respect to the first of these deficiencies, I argue that observation statements describing a public state of affairs in the common public environment of two (...) or more observers which those observers confirm as a correct description provide a far more objective and secure foundation for empirical knowledge than statements describing private events in the experience of a single individual. In the course of this argument, I also invoke Wittgenstein's (1953) demonstration — his 'private language argument' — of the incoherence of traditional subjective empiricism. Regarding the second deficiency, I argue that observation statements describing private events can serve as data for an objective study, provided that (a) the verbal behavior in which they consist and its context are objectively observed and recorded, and (b) an explanation is given of how this verbal behavior is generated by the events it reports. (shrink)

We are in places. Some places beckon us, some are to be avoided, and some are banal. However, this emplacement urges reflection. In this essay I consider the role of place in environmental experiences, beginning with analysis of the concepts of place and space that motivate the development of four environmental imaginaries (extractive, wilderness, managed, and reciprocal). Ultimately, through a discussion of fences, I aim to show how place-meanings are materially inscribed on the landscape while evidencing the (...) value of place-based analysis to understanding the ways these landscapes are shaped by and serve to shape experience. (shrink)

In restricting his analysis to the causal relations of functionalism, on the one hand, and the neurophysiological realizers of biology, on the other, Palmer has overlooked an alternative conception of the relationship between color experience and the brain - one that liberalises the relation between mental phenomena and their physical implementation, without generating functionalism.

A pervasive theme in George Seddon's extensive oeuvre is sense of place. Over a number of decades he has explored and reworked the conceptual and phenomenological aspects of this theme. This article takes its cue from Seddon's more recent critical observations on sense of place and considers the temporal and spatial dimensions of everyday experience in the informational age. Recent trends in gardening and garden theory are examined in the context of certain pathologies associated with this (...) class='Hi'>experience, and in particular cultural simultanagnosia: `unable to see the forest for the trees'. A key argument is that as contemporary experience tends to differentiate into discrete modules there is paradoxically also a tendency to reengage with the ecocultural world in the form of place-making, in symbolic performances of milieu. (shrink)

Notions of space and place are often used interchangeably in everyday speech, but they are distinguished both conceptually and historically. When put in relation to space and place, beauty reveals all its vitality and ties to socio-political issues, like: why do we consider a place beautiful and another place ugly? How do taste judgments about places influence planning, tourism, heritage policies, urban, and landscape architecture? I will develop my argument in four points. First, I will shortly (...) pin down the main tenets of a concept of beauty that is inherently spatial, by rephrasing Roger Scruton’s insights on the beautiful and Ed Casey’s notion of ‘implacement’. Second, I will address the interconnection between the modern emergence of a quantitative and objectivist concept of space and a non-relational idea of beauty. Third, I will expose the relationship between the concept of place, idiographic and qualitative, and the emergence of a site-specific, phenomenologically based concept of beauty. In conclusion, I will show how non-relational conceptions of beauty risk to colonize aesthetic experience and I will take a stand for a relational conception of beauty against the risk of standardization of both landscape appreciation and planning. (shrink)

: An appeal is made to the foot travels of Matsuo Basho, especially his 1689 journey to northern Japan, reflected in his Narrow Road to the Interior, as examples of wandering. It is suggested that while the travels of a poetwanderer such as Basho are notably distinct from shamanic travels in some respects, they are similar in other important ways, for example in their capacity to give perspective to our everyday experience. Based on Basho's example, three aspects of wandering (...) are discussed that may be of aesthetic interest, and it is concluded that in the face of various technological and social developments in industrial societies that increasingly alienate us from our environment, wandering may help us to recover a sense of the depth of space, the real diversity of places, and our human lives in the larger context of nature. (shrink)