Content area
Full Text
MALPAS, J. E. Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. vii + 218 pp. Cloth, $54.95-- This book's subtitle usefully indicates the kind of project its author is engaged in in its pages. The conception of a "philosophical topography" is drawn directly from the preface of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. Along with brief concluding reflections on the role of "place" in philosophy, J. E. Malpas offers eight chapters of exploration of the interrelations of concepts, and realities, of space, time, place, self, agency, embodiment, and world. The book is clearly written, interesting, and unusually synoptic in its sources, guiding ideas, and scope. It is a member of a growing body of attractively ecumenical work in recent philosophy, bringing into creative conjunction insights and approaches from both analytic and continental writers and perspectives. Malpas presents himself as, one might say, a Heideggerian Davidsonian (or perhaps a Davidsonian Heideggerian). Other presences are evident: Strawson, Wittgenstein, Gareth Evans, Merleau-Ponty, Bergson, John Campbell, Edward Casey, Kant. So too is engagement with literary articulations of concern with place in human life, in Proust, Wordsworth, and other writers, especially antipodean ones; and involvement as well with philosophical geographers who have had things to say about place.
As well as its dernier mot continental/analytic ecumenicity, Malpas's book is interestingly old-fashioned; it keeps company with, indeed, revives, methodologically and doctrinally, Oxbridge Kantian and neo-Kantian transcendental "logical geography," especially as found in the pages of Strawson's Individuals (London: Metheun, 1959), a book Malpas sometimes allies himself with and sometimes opposes.
Malpas's general conclusion is that a family of concepts exhibits an irreducible centrality, interdependence, and essential place in what it is to be ourselves, and to have (or have a capacity for) experiences of anything like the character we know: concepts, notably, of spatiality, temporality, an embodied self, agency, objectivity, subjectivity, place, and a spatio-temporally structured world of other selves and physical objects. All, for Malpas, are ineliminable, essential, and both importantly distinct and intertwined in the very possibility of our having lives and experiences.
A central issue posed, and not directly confronted or (as a result) resolved, in Malpas's project, and the dialectical force with which its arguments mean to make their case, and in turn their evaluation be...