Heidegger and the Thinking of Place ─ Explorations in the Topology of Being

The idea of place--topos--runs through Martin Heidegger's thinking almost from thevery start. It can be seen not only in his attachment to the famous hut in Todtnauberg but in hisconstant 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 theThinking of Place, Malpas examines the topological aspects of Heidegger's thought andoffers a broader elaboration of the philosophical significance of place. Doing so, he provides adistinct and productive approach to Heidegger as well as a new reading of other key figures--notablyKant, Aristotle, Gadamer, and Davidson, but also Benjamin, Arendt, and Camus. Malpas, expandingarguments 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 ofthe transcendental, the convergence of Heideggerian topology with Davidsonian triangulation, thenecessity of mortality in the possibility of human life, the role of materiality in the working ofart, 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 ofwonder, of philosophy, of questioning, he writes, is the very topos of thinking.

Jeff Malpas is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tasmania. He is the author of Heidegger's Topology: Being, Place, World (MIT Press, 2007).