It 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.