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May 01, 2007
The theme of Jeff Malpas's recent book Heidegger's Topology Being, Place, World is that of place and its role in Heidegger's thinking. Place is a term that Heidegger himself used for the ultimate destination of his way of thinking---- ie., thinking through the meaning of being ultimately leads to thinking about place. It connects with this place-oriented thinking over at junk for code.
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."
In this review at Enowning says that place is a term that has not received proper consideration before this study.
The book begins by looking at the question of situatedness in early Heidegger, and then moves on to a detailed analysis of place in Being and Time, with many references to Dreyfus's study. The role of our bodies in our understanding of space and orientation is examined, as is dasein's embeddedness in the world. Questions about place and its meaning, its role in different works, are revisited through out the book, so that our understanding of its importance in Heidegger's philosophy grows steadily. In addition to Being and Time, the pertinent parts of the "Letter on Humanism", "The Origin of the Work of Art", and "The Thing", are covered in detail, as are several courses. And because the theme is place, "Building Dwelling Thinking" also gets close attention. .
Place, in the sense used in this book, is not merely space or geometric volume as was commonly understood in modernity. It transgresses this.
Heidegger discusses the development of the technical understanding of space in Being and Time, and in more detail in his lectures on science, where reads he closely reads Galileo and Newton's texts to illuminate the paradigm changes within. However, Heidegger is concerned to think philosophy in terms of place not space.
In his Introduction Malpas says that:
Much of my argument here could be put in terms of the idea that the question of being is indeed underlain by a “more radical question”—namely, the question of place. Strictly speaking... I would prefer to say that being and place are inextricably bound together in a way that does not allow one to be seen merely as an “effect” of the other, rather being emerges only in and through place. The question of being must be understood in this light, such that the question of being itself unfolds into the question of place.
The question of being already implies (“unfolds into”) the question of place----its an interesting way of looking at the world isn't it.
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When you say: "In his review Stephan Käufer says that", the hyperlink on "review" points not to Stephan Käufer's review, but to the Ereignis review.