Heidegger and the Issue of Space

Heidegger and the Issue of Space
Author: Alejandro A. Vallega
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2010-11
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0271045647

As the only full-length treatment in English of spatiality in Martin Heidegger&’s work, this book makes an important contribution to Heidegger studies as well as to research on the history of philosophy. More generally, it advances our understanding of philosophy in terms of its &"exilic&" character, a sense of alterity that becomes apparent when one fully engages the temporality or finitude essential to conceptual determinations. By focusing on Heidegger&’s treatment of the classical difficulty of giving conceptual articulation to spatiality, the author discusses how Heidegger&’s thought is caught up in and enacts the temporality it uncovers in Being and Time and in his later writings. Ultimately, when understood in this manner, thought is an &"exilic&" experience&—a determination of being that in each case comes to pass in a loss of first principles and origins and, simultaneously, as an opening to conceptual figurations yet to come. The discussion engages such main historical figures as Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, and indirectly Husserl, as well as contemporary European and American Continental thought.

Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning

Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning
Author: Steven Galt Crowell
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2001-04-14
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 081011805X

In this work Crowell proposes that the distinguishing feature of 20th-century philosophy is not so much its emphasis on language as its concern with meaning. He argues that transcendental phenomenology is indispensible to the philosophical explanation of the space of meaning.

Heidegger Among the Sculptors

Heidegger Among the Sculptors
Author: Andrew Mitchell
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 142
Release: 2010-07-16
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0804775761

In the 1950s and 60s, Martin Heidegger turned to sculpture to rethink the relationship between bodies and space and the role of art in our lives. In his texts on the subject—a catalog contribution for an Ernst Barlach exhibition, a speech at a gallery opening for Bernhard Heiliger, a lecture on bas-relief depictions of Athena, and a collaboration with Eduardo Chillida—he formulates his later aesthetic theory, a thinking of relationality. Against a traditional view of space as an empty container for discrete bodies, these writings understand the body as already beyond itself in a world of relations and conceive of space as a material medium of relational contact. Sculpture shows us how we belong to the world, a world in the midst of a technological process of uprooting and homelessness. Heidegger suggests how we can still find room to dwell therein. Filled with illustrations of works that Heidegger encountered or considered, Heidegger Among the Sculptors makes a singular contribution to the philosophy of sculpture.

Heidegger and the Thinking of Place

Heidegger and the Thinking of Place
Author: Jeff Malpas
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 389
Release: 2017-03-03
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0262533677

The philosophical significance of place—in Heidegger's work and as the focus of a distinctive mode of philosophical thinking. 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.

Heidegger's Topology

Heidegger's Topology
Author: Jeff Malpas
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 425
Release: 2008-08-29
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0262250330

This groundbreaking inquiry into the centrality of place in Martin Heidegger's thinking offers not only an illuminating reading of Heidegger's thought but a detailed investigation into the way in which the concept of place relates to core philosophical issues. In Heidegger's Topology, Jeff Malpas argues that an engagement with place, explicit in Heidegger's later work, informs Heidegger's thought as a whole. What guides Heidegger's thinking, Malpas writes, is a conception of philosophy's starting point: our finding ourselves already "there," situated in the world, in "place". Heidegger's concepts of being and place, he argues, are inextricably bound together. Malpas follows the development of Heidegger's topology through three stages: the early period of the 1910s and 1920s, through Being and Time, centered on the "meaning of being"; the middle period of the 1930s into the 1940s, centered on the "truth of being"; and the late period from the mid-1940s on, when the "place of being" comes to the fore. (Malpas also challenges the widely repeated arguments that link Heidegger's notions of place and belonging to his entanglement with Nazism.) The significance of Heidegger as a thinker of place, Malpas claims, lies not only in Heidegger's own investigations but also in the way that spatial and topographic thinking has flowed from Heidegger's work into that of other key thinkers of the past 60 years.

The Fate of Place

The Fate of Place
Author: Edward Casey
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 507
Release: 2013-05-13
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0520954564

In this imaginative and comprehensive study, Edward Casey, one of the most incisive interpreters of the Continental philosophical tradition, offers a philosophical history of the evolving conceptualizations of place and space in Western thought. Not merely a presentation of the ideas of other philosophers, The Fate of Place is acutely sensitive to silences, absences, and missed opportunities in the complex history of philosophical approaches to space and place. A central theme is the increasing neglect of place in favor of space from the seventh century A.D. onward, amounting to the virtual exclusion of place by the end of the eighteenth century. Casey begins with mythological and religious creation stories and the theories of Plato and Aristotle and then explores the heritage of Neoplatonic, medieval, and Renaissance speculations about space. He presents an impressive history of the birth of modern spatial conceptions in the writings of Newton, Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant and delineates the evolution of twentieth-century phenomenological approaches in the work of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard, and Heidegger. In the book's final section, Casey explores the postmodern theories of Foucault, Derrida, Tschumi, Deleuze and Guattari, and Irigaray.

Being and Time

Being and Time
Author: Martin Heidegger
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 612
Release: 2008-07-22
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0061575593

"What is the meaning of being?" This is the central question of Martin Heidegger's profoundly important work, in which the great philosopher seeks to explain the basic problems of existence. A central influence on later philosophy, literature, art, and criticism—as well as existentialism and much of postmodern thought—Being and Time forever changed the intellectual map of the modern world. As Richard Rorty wrote in the New York Times Book Review, "You cannot read most of the important thinkers of recent times without taking Heidegger's thought into account." This first paperback edition of John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson's definitive translation also features a new foreword by Heidegger scholar Taylor Carman.

Heidegger and the Problem of Consciousness

Heidegger and the Problem of Consciousness
Author: Nancy J. Holland
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 159
Release: 2018-07-06
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0253035988

Nancy J. Holland turns to the thought of Martin Heidegger to help understand an age-old philosophical question: Is there a split between the body and the mind? Arguing against philosophical positions that define human consciousness as an overarching phenomenon or reduce it to the brain or physicality, Holland contends that consciousness is relational and it is this relationship that allows us to inhabit and negotiate in the world. Holland forwards a complex and nuanced reading of Heidegger as she focuses on consciousness, being, and what might constitute the animal or, more broadly, other-than-human world. Holland engages with the depth and breadth of Heidegger's work as she opens space for a discussion about the uniqueness of human consciousness.

Complicated Presence

Complicated Presence
Author: Jussi Backman
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2015-03-16
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1438456506

From its Presocratic beginnings, Western philosophy concerned itself with a quest for unity both in terms of the systematization of knowledge and as a metaphysical search for a unity of being—two trends that can be regarded as converging and culminating in Hegel's system of absolute idealism. Since Hegel, however, the philosophical quest for unity has become increasingly problematic. Jussi Backman returns to that question in this book, examining the place of the unity of being in the work of Heidegger. Backman sketches a consistent picture of Heidegger as a thinker of unity who throughout his career in different ways attempted to come to terms with both Parmenides's and Aristotle's fundamental questions concerning the singularity or multiplicity of being—attempting to do so, however, in a "postmetaphysical" manner rooted in rather than above and beyond particular, situated beings. Through his analysis, Backman offers a new way of understanding the basic continuity of Heidegger's philosophical project and the interconnectedness of such key Heideggerian concepts as ecstatic temporality, the ontological difference, the turn (Kehre), the event (Ereignis), the fourfold (Geviert), and the analysis of modern technology.