This book explores the ways in which the spatio-temporal contingency of human life is being conceived in different fields of research. Specifically, it looks at the relationship between the situatedness of human life, the situation or place in which human life is supposed to be situated, and the dimensions of space and time in which both situation and place are usually themselves supposed to be situated. Over the last two or three decades, the spatio-temporal contingency of human life has become an important topic of research in a broad range of different disciplines including the social sciences, the cultural sciences, the cognitive sciences, and philosophy. However, this research topic is referred to in quite different ways: while some researchers refer to it in terms of “situation”, emphasizing the “situatedness” of human experience and action, others refer to it in terms of “place”, emphasizing the “power of place” and advocating a “topological” or “topographical turn” in the context of a larger “spatial turn”. Interdisciplinary exchange is so far hampered by the fact that the notions referred to and the relationships between them are usually not sufficiently questioned. This book addresses these issues by bringing together contributions on the spatio-temporal contingency of human life from different fields of research.

This book analyzes the hermeneutics of place, raising questions about central issues such as textuality, dialogue, and play. It discusses the central figures in the development of hermeneutics and place, and surveys disciplines and areas in which a hermeneutic approach to place has been fruitful. It covers the range of philosophical hermeneutic theory, both within philosophy itself as well as from other disciplines. In doing so, the volume reflects the state of theorization on these issues, and also looks forward to the implications and opportunities that exist. Philosophical hermeneutics has fundamentally altered philosophy’s approach to place. Issues such as how we dwell in place, how place is imagined, created, preserved, and lost, and how philosophy itself exists in place have become central. While there is much research applying hermeneutics to place, there is little which both reflects on that heritage and critically analyzes a hermeneutic approach to place. This book fills that void by offering a sustained analysis of the central elements, major figures, and disciplinary applications of hermeneutics and place.

DIVA distinguished critic explores the term "situatedness" - the self's position in time and place in the world and its treatment seen in legal theory, social science, literature, and philosophy./div

Following on from the ground-breaking first edition, which received the 2014 EDRA Achievement Award, this fully updated text includes new chapters on current issues in the built environment, such as GIS and mapping, climate change, and qualitative approaches. Place attachments are powerful emotional bonds that form between people and their physical surroundings. They inform our sense of identity, create meaning in our lives, facilitate community, and influence action. Place attachments have bearing on such diverse issues as rootedness and belonging, placemaking and displacement, mobility and migration, intergroup conflict, civic engagement, social housing and urban redevelopment, natural resource management, and global climate change. In this multidisciplinary book, Manzo and Devine-Wright draw together the latest thinking by leading scholars from around the globe, including contributions from scholars such as Daniel Williams, Mindy Fullilove, Randy Hester, and David Seamon, to capture significant advancements in three main areas: theory, methods, and applications. Over the course of fifteen chapters, using a wide range of conceptual and applied methods, the authors critically review and challenge contemporary knowledge, identify significant advances, and point to areas for future research. This important volume offers the most current understandings about place attachment, a critical concept for the environmental social sciences and placemaking professions.

Hermeneutics is a major theoretical and practical form of intellectual enquiry, central not only to philosophy but many other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. With phenomenology and existentialism, it is also one of the twentieth century’s most important philosophical movements and includes major thinkers such as Heidegger, Gadamer and Ricoeur. The Routledge Companion to Hermeneutics is an outstanding guide and reference source to the key philosophers, topics and themes in this exciting subject and is the first volume of its kind. Comprising over fifty chapters by a team of international contributors the Companion is divided into five parts: main figures in the hermeneutical tradition movement, including Heidegger, Gadamer and Ricoeur main topics in hermeneutics such as language, truth, relativism and history the engagement of hermeneutics with central disciplines such as literature, religion, race and gender, and art hermeneutics and world philosophies including Asian, Islamic and Judaic thought hermeneutic challenges and debates, such as critical theory, structuralism and phenomenology.

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.

This book explores the extent to which our lives become an important underlying context for data production. Drawing on insights from Gestalt psychology, feminism and post-structuralism, it discusses how to situate yourself in the different phases of research.

While the concept of place remains undertheorized in Kierkegaard research, this study argues that place is at the center of Kierkegaard’s thinking. The first part of the book shows that Kierkegaard’s notion of situatedness as being-placed in a socio-historical situation conditioned by a situation prior to situatedness points to a realist position and a flat ontology. Secondly, the book develops a detailed analysis of the ontological structure of the existential place (the place we ourselves are) and concrete places (the places where we are). Place opens a qualified space within bounds (the existence-sphere), an atmosphere of elemental attunement and attuned elementality. Finally, the book collects the dots from part one and two in a topological realist approach to Kierkegaard’s theology and three main definitions of God: God is love, God is that everything is possible, and God is the middle term. The book concludes that Kierkegaard’s existential topography reveals a realist position: where we are is never exhausted by being the place where we are.

The People, Place, and Space Reader brings together the writings of scholars, designers, and activists from a variety of fields to make sense of the makings and meanings of the world we inhabit. They help us to understand the relationships between people and the environment at all scales, and to consider the active roles individuals, groups, and social structures play in creating the environments in which people live, work, and play. These readings highlight the ways in which space and place are produced through large- and small-scale social, political, and economic practices, and offer new ways to think about how people engage the environment in multiple and diverse ways. Providing an essential resource for students of urban studies, geography, sociology and many other areas, this book brings together important but, till now, widely dispersed writings across many inter-related disciplines. Introductions from the editors precede each section; introducing the texts, demonstrating their significance, and outlining the key issues surrounding the topic. A companion website, PeoplePlaceSpace.org, extends the work even further by providing an on-going series of additional reading lists that cover issues ranging from food security to foreclosure, psychiatric spaces to the environments of predator animals.

The story of the raped and murdered woman of Judges 19 and the civil war and mass marriage that ensue in chapters 20–21 are hardly favorite tales of the Hebrew Bible. The chapters have often been dismissed as little more than an anachronistic epilogue, an awkward amalgamation of earlier stories or a “text of terror,” proof of patriarchal oppression. This book argues that, far from being a clumsy collage, Judges 19–21 is a carefully narrated tale that chronicles the descent of a nation into extreme individualism and fragmentation. In dialogue with continental philosopher Luce Irigaray, it will uncover the dynamics of identity formation and how differential constructions of identity of the One and the Other yield patterns of victimization and justification of violence. This literary-philosophical reading will bring out silences and missed possibilities for the subjectivity of women, whilst also shedding light on the victimization of men within the logic of totalitarian identity constructions. The end of Judges therefore offers a theological conclusion to the book as a whole and opens up avenues for thought on theological anthropology, understandings of identity and gender, and a theological commentary on violence.