Promotional Information

In Heidegger's Topology, Malpas argues convincingly that, throughout Heidegger's fifty-three-year philosophical career, his central focus was realizing more and more profoundly that human being is always and already human being situated in place. He effectively demonstrates how this 'emplacement' became, for Heidegger, the central answer to the question of how anything, including human being, can exist and be the thing it is. In carefully explicating the shifting conceptual meaning of place and emplacement in Heidegger's writings, Malpas provides an important philosophical addition to the growing body of academic and applied research in 'place studies.' -- David Seamon, Department of Architecture, Kansas State University, and editor, Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology This is a brilliant book that will change the entire field of Heidegger studies. It makes a deeply cogent and extremely eloquent case for regarding place as the underlying thread of Heidegger's entire philosophical development, while at the same time advancing the argument for considering place to be a sine qua non in philosophical analysis more generally. -- Edward S. Casey, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Stony Brook University What marks the possibility of a genuine philosophical adventure is when a body of work is illuminated in ways that are not simply original but also generative of new work. Such would be a description of Malpas' approach to Heidegger. Putting to one side the usual pieties that surround Heidegger's work and giving priority to topology and place, Malpas will make any reader of Heidegger think again. What emerges is a Heidegger whose work forms an integral part of a philosophical geography. As such, terms such as 'life', 'mortality' and the 'environment' -- words with a real exigency -- come to acquire genuine philosophical force. This is a book that combines a passionate commitment to scholarship with an insistence on demonstrating the relevance of philosophy in a dramatically new way. -- Andrew Benjamin,, Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building, University of Technology, Sydney

About the Author

Jeff Malpas is Distinguished Professor at the University of Tasmania and Distinguished Visiting Professor at Latrobe University. He is the author of Heidegger's Topology- Being, Place, World and Heidegger and the Thinking of Place- Explorations in the Topology of Being, both published by the MIT Press.

Reviews

Malpas's work opens up new ways to read Heidegger (considered for too long the philosopher of time) by underscoring the centrality of place and its many implications for understanding our world, our environment, and ourselves.—John Panteleimon Manoussakis, Journal of the History of Philosophy