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7 - The unity and complexity of place

Jeff Malpas
Jeff Malpas
Affiliation:
University of Tasmania
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Summary

Place always opens a region in which it gathers the things in their belonging together … Place is not located in a pre-given space, after the manner of physical–technological space. The latter unfolds itself only through the reigning of places of a region.

Martin Heidegger, ‘Art and Space’

The very possibility of being a creature that can have thoughts and that can have experience of a world, is dependent on being a creature that has the capacity to act in relation to objects within the world. And this, in turn, is dependent on being a creature that has a grasp of both the subjective space correlated with its own capacities, as well as with features in its immediate environment, and the objective space within which the creature, and its environmental surroundings, are located. To be a creature that has such a grasp is also to be a creature that can distinguish between its own perspective on the world and that of others. To be a creature that can have thoughts, then, and that can have experience of a world, is not merely to be a creature located in a physically extended space, but rather to be a creature that finds itself always located within a complex but unitary place that encompasses the creature itself, other creatures, and a multiplicity of objects and environmental features.

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Place and Experience
A Philosophical Topography
 , pp. 157 - 174
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1999

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