The idea of place--topos--runs through Martin
Heidegger's thinking almost from the very start. It can
be seen not only in his attachment to the famous hut in
Todtnauberg but in his constant deployment of
topological terms and images and in the situated,
''placed'' character of his thought and of its major
themes and motifs. Heidegger's work, argues Jeff Malpas,
exemplifies the practice of ''philosophical topology.''
In Heidegger and the Thinking of Place, Malpas examines
the topological aspects of Heidegger's thought and
offers a broader elaboration of the philosophical
significance of place. Doing so, he provides a distinct
and productive approach to Heidegger as well as a new
reading of other key figures--notably Kant, Aristotle,
Gadamer, and Davidson, but also Benjamin, Arendt, and
Camus.Malpas, expanding arguments he made in his earlier
book Heidegger's Topology (MIT Press, 2007), discusses
such topics as the role of place in philosophical
thinking, the topological character of the
transcendental, the convergence of Heideggerian topology
with Davidsonian triangulation, the necessity of
mortality in the possibility of human life, the role of
materiality in the working of art, the significance of
nostalgia, and the nature of philosophy as beginning in
wonder. Philosophy, Malpas argues, begins in wonder and
begins in place and the experience of place. The place
of wonder, of philosophy, of questioning, he writes, is
the very topos of thinking. |
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