What happens when we glance around a room? How do we trust what we see in fleeting moments? In The World at a Glance, Edward S. Casey describes how glancing counts for more of human perception than previously imagined. An entire universe is perceived in a glance, but our quick and uncommitted attention prevents examination of these rapid acts and processes. While breaking down this paradox, Casey surveys the glance as an essential way by which we acquaint (...) ourselves with the world. This experiential tour-de-force reveals what happens in a blink of an eye. It will become a landmark study in phenomenology, philosophy, environmental philosophy, and the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

This essay examines the role of place in painting. This role is multiple – at once attracting our look but also locatory of whatever is displayed in the painting itself and attracting our attention to it as a place distinct from the place where we are painting it or viewing it. Examined here is also the role of the lived body in the apprehension of place in painting: a corporeal animating force that animates a genuinely lived place as it is (...) set forth or intimated in paintings of seen, remembered, or imagined places. Such placially specific paintings are at once a commentary and a continuation on how we experience places in the context of the lived world. Included are analyses of three placially oriented paintings of my own as well as one by de Kooning – all in an effort to show the multivalence of place in painting. (shrink)

This chapter concentrates on the edges of the lived body, which act to mediate between the outermost and innermost edges. The prospects for construing bodily edges are explored. Bodily edges realise the paradigm of definitive but incomplete self-knowledge in a very particular way: namely, that such edges are parts of parts. The internal and external edges of bodily parts are not only glimpsed in the course of ongoing experience but also offer a grip for hands. Inside/outside is an especially significant (...) binary edge structure, and is altogether central to edges that inhere in bodies. Bodily edges act as the mediatrix between the edges of the perceived earth and those of the inner psyche, and also provide the conjunctures for many things in experienced life-worlds. (shrink)

Cover -- THE WORLD ON EDGE -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- CONTENTS -- Acknowledgments -- Prelude -- PART 1 Sorting Out Edges -- Preface to Part One -- 1. Borders and Boundaries -- Interlude I A Panoply of Edges -- 2. Edges and Surfaces, Edges and Limits -- Interlude II Cusps, Traces, Veils -- 3. Edges of Places and Events -- Interlude III Frames in/of Painting -- PART 2 Constructed versus Naturally Given Edges -- Preface to Part Two (...) -- 4. Natural versus Artifactual Edges -- 5. Wild Edges -- Interlude IV Listening to Edges in Music -- 6. Landscape Edges -- 7. Intermediate Edges: Parks, Gardens, Neighborhoods, Streets -- PART 3 Edges of Body and Psyche, Earth and Sky -- Preface to Part Three -- 8. At the Edges of My Body -- 9. Being on Edge and Falling Apart -- 10. From Earth's Edge to the Sky and Beyond -- PART 4 Parting Thoughts -- A Last Lesson: Not to Put Too Fine an Edge on Things -- Postlude: Why Edges Matter in Their Very Heterodoxicality -- Epilogue: Life on the Edge of Danger, Disaster, and Doom -- Afterword/Foreword: Thinking Edges, Edges of Thinking -- Index. (shrink)

Plants are commonly considered immobile, in contrast to humans and other animals. But vegetal existence involves many place-based forms of change: stems growing upward, roots spreading outward, fronds unfurling in response to sunlight, seeds traveling across wide distances, and other intricate relationships with the surrounding world. How do plants as sessile, growing, decaying, and metamorphosing beings shape the places they inhabit, and how are they shaped by them? How do human places interact with those of plants-in lived experience; in landscape (...) painting; in cultivation and contemplation; in forests, fields, gardens, and cities? Examining these questions and many more, Plants in Place is a collaborative study of vegetal phenomenology at the intersection of Edward S. Casey's phenomenology of place and Michael Marder's plant-thinking. It focuses on both the microlevel of the dynamic constitution of plant edges or a child's engagement with moss and the macrolevel of habitats that include the sociality of trees. This compelling portrait of plants and their places provides readers with new ways to appreciate the complexity and vitality of vegetal life. Eloquent, descriptively rich, and insightful, the book also shows how the worlds of plants can enhance our understanding and experience of place more broadly. (shrink)

Edward S. Casey invites us to rethink our emotions as fundamentally emerging from outside and around the self, redirecting our attention from the subjective sources of emotion to what reaches us from outside the domain of the subject.

In this imaginative and comprehensive study, Edward Casey, one of the most incisive interpreters of the Continental philosophical tradition, offers a philosophical history of the evolving conceptualizations of place and space in Western thought. Not merely a presentation of the ideas of other philosophers, _The Fate of Place_ is acutely sensitive to silences, absences, and missed opportunities in the complex history of philosophical approaches to space and place. A central theme is the increasing neglect of place in favor (...) of space from the seventh century A.D. onward, amounting to the virtual exclusion of place by the end of the eighteenth century. Casey begins with mythological and religious creation stories and the theories of Plato and Aristotle and then explores the heritage of Neoplatonic, medieval, and Renaissance speculations about space. He presents an impressive history of the birth of modern spatial conceptions in the writings of Newton, Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant and delineates the evolution of twentieth-century phenomenological approaches in the work of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard, and Heidegger. In the book's final section, Casey explores the postmodern theories of Foucault, Derrida, Tschumi, Deleuze and Guattari, and Irigaray. (shrink)

In this imaginative and comprehensive study, Edward Casey, one of the most incisive interpreters of the Continental philosophical tradition, offers a philosophical history of the evolving conceptualizations of place and space in Western thought. Not merely a presentation of the ideas of other philosophers, _The Fate of Place_ is acutely sensitive to silences, absences, and missed opportunities in the complex history of philosophical approaches to space and place. A central theme is the increasing neglect of place in favor (...) of space from the seventh century A.D. onward, amounting to the virtual exclusion of place by the end of the eighteenth century. Casey begins with mythological and religious creation stories and the theories of Plato and Aristotle and then explores the heritage of Neoplatonic, medieval, and Renaissance speculations about space. He presents an impressive history of the birth of modern spatial conceptions in the writings of Newton, Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant and delineates the evolution of twentieth-century phenomenological approaches in the work of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard, and Heidegger. In the book's final section, Casey explores the postmodern theories of Foucault, Derrida, Tschumi, Deleuze and Guattari, and Irigaray. (shrink)

Edward S. Casey provides a thorough description of the varieties of human memory, including recognizing and reminding, reminiscing and commemorating, body memory and place memory. The preface to the new edition extends the scope of the original text to include issues of collective memory, forgetting, and traumatic memory, and aligns this book with Casey's newest work on place and space. This ambitious study demonstrates that nothing in our lives is unaffected by remembering.

Offers a philosophical exploration of the pervasiveness of place. Presenting an account of the role of place in human experience, this book points to place's indispensability in navigation and orientation. The role of the lived body in matters of place isconsidered, and the characteristics of built places are explored.

In the developing world, the dramatic male bias in tobacco use is usually ascribed to pronounced gender disparities in social, political, or economic power. This bias might also reflect under-reporting by woman and/or over-reporting by men. To test the role of gender inequality on gender differences in tobacco use we investigated tobacco use among the Aka, a Congo Basin foraging population noted for its exceptionally high degree of gender equality. We also tested a sexual selection hypothesis—that Aka men’s tobacco use (...) is related to risk taking. Tobacco use, income, tobacco purchases, tobacco sharing, reasons for using tobacco, risk taking, and other variables were measured using structured surveys and peer reports. Tobacco use was verified by testing for salivary cotinine, a nicotine metabolite. Contrary to expectations, we found a very large male bias in tobacco use. Low levels of use among females appeared to be explained by aversions to tobacco, concerns over its negative effects on fetal health, and a desire to attract husbands, who prefer nonsmoking wives. High male use appeared to be related to a desire to enhance hunting abilities and attract and/or retain wives, who prefer husbands that smoke. We conclude that low levels of smoking by Aka women are better explained by the hypothesis that women evolved to avoid plant toxins to protect their fetuses and nursing infants. High male use might be better explained by sexual selection. We also highlight the important role that recreational drugs appear to play in hunter-gatherer sharing relationships. (shrink)

Repositions Bachelard as a critical and integral part of contemporary continental philosophy. Like Schelling before him and Deleuze and Guattari after him, Gaston Bachelard made major philosophical contributions to the advancement of science and the arts. In addition to being a mathematician and epistemologist whose influential work in the philosophy of science is still being absorbed, Bachelard was also one of the most innovative thinkers on poetic creativity and its ethical implications. His approaches to literature and the arts by way (...) of elemental reverie awakened long-buried modes of thinking that have inspired literary critics, depth psychologists, poets, and artists alike. Bachelard’s extraordinary body of work, unduly neglected by the English-language reception of continental philosophy in recent decades, exhibits a capacity to speak to the full complexity and wider reaches of human thinking. The essays in this volume analyze Bachelard as a phenomenological thinker and situate his thought within the Western tradition. Considering his work alongside that of Schelling, Husserl, Bergson, Buber, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Gadamer, Deleuze, and Nancy, this collection highlights some of Bachelard’s most provocative proposals on questions of ontology, hermeneutics, ethics, environmental politics, spirituality, and the possibilities they offer for productive transformations of self and world. (shrink)

Drawing on his own experiences of imagining, Edward S. Casey describes the essential forms that imagination assumes in everyday life. In a detailed analysis of the fundamental features of all imaginative experience, Casey shows imagining to be eidetically distinct from perceiving and defines it as a radically autonomous act, involving a characteristic freedom of mind. A new preface places Imagining within the context of current issues in philosophy and psychology.

What happens when we glance around a room? How do we trust what we see in fleeting moments? In The World at a Glance, Edward S. Casey describes how glancing counts for more of human perception than previously imagined. An entire universe is perceived in a glance, but our quick and uncommitted attention prevents examination of these rapid acts and processes. While breaking down this paradox, Casey surveys the glance as an essential way by which we acquaint (...) ourselves with the world. This experiential tour-de-force reveals what happens in a blink of an eye. It will become a landmark study in phenomenology, philosophy, environmental philosophy, and the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

"You are here, a map declares, but of course you are not, any more than you truly occupy the vantage point into which a landscape painting puts you. How maps and paintings figure and reconfigure space--as well as our place in it--is the subject of Edward S. Casey's study, an exploration of how we portray the world and its many places. Casey's discussion ranges widely from Northern Sung landscape painting to nineteenth-century American and British landscape painting and (...) photography, from prehistoric petroglyphs and medieval portolan charts to seventeenth-century Dutch cartography and land survey maps of the American frontier. From these culturally and historically diverse forays a theory of representation emerges. Casey proposes that the representation of place in visual works be judged in terms not of resemblance, but of reconnecting with an earth and world that are not the mere content of mind or language--a reconnection that calls for the embodiment and implacement of the human subject." -- Book jacket. (shrink)

This is an interview with Edward S. Casey, conducted by Donald A. Landes.

Psychology without genuinely thoughtful philosophy winds up as self-help gimmicks; philosophy without the insights & feeling of psychology remains an arcane academic game out of touch with life. By re-joining spirit & soul, this book is a major work of both philosophy & psychology. Casey asks puzzling questions & gives lasting answers. In a clear & vivid manner, one of America's best professional thinkers takes up one of the great themes of imagination, fantasy, hallucination, remembering & perceiving. Film & (...) architecture provide surprising material for his brilliant & useful account of basic philosophical problems which are also major mysteries of the soul. (shrink)

IMAGINING and remembering, two of the most frequent and fundamental acts of mind, have long been unwelcome guests in most of the many mansions of philosophy. When not simply ignored or over-looked, they have been considered only to be dismissed. This is above all true of imagination, as first becomes evident in Plato’s view that the art of making exact images tends to degenerate into the making of mere semblances. Kant, despite the importance he gives to imagination in the first (...) edition of The Critique of Pure Reason, nevertheless considers images to be lowly "monograms" that are unruly and thus untrustworthy. In more recent times, Sartre, who is nearly as ambivalent as Kant on the subject, has stressed imagination’s "essential poverty"—its character as "debased thought"—while Ryle, in covert counterpoint, has attempted to conceive imagining as parody and pretense: as mere make-believe. (shrink)

Encounters with Alphonso Lingis is the first extensive study of this American philosopher who is gaining an international reputation to augment his national one. The distinguished contributors to this volume address most of the central themes found in Lingis's writings—including singularity and otherness, death and eroticism, emotions and rationality, embodiment and the face, excess and the sacred. The book closes with a new essay by Lingis himself.

Shows how contemporary artists re-envision the earth in innovative painterly, sculptural, and architectural ways.

This essay explores two topics in Leonard Lawlor’s work: the role of space and the place of emotion. Lawlor’s early and middle works offer a complex and subtle discussion of time, with occasional adversions to space. I attempt to draw out what he says, or should say, about space and place in an effort for it to be given its due in the face of the temporocentrism that is endemic in continental philosophy since Bergson. From there I explore the role (...) of affect and emotion in Lawlor’s more recent writing, arguing for its centrality in his promising and productive idea of “speaking out.”. (shrink)

This piece extends Edward Casey’s meditations on the notion of place. Here he specifically looks at “limitrophic” phenomena, including the U.S.-Mexico border as a means for thinking between edge and limit, place and voice.

The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience was first published in 1953. In the first of four parts, Dufrenne distinguishes the "aesthetic object" from the "work of art." In the second, he elucidates types of works of art, especially music and painting. He devotes his third section to aesthetic perception. In the fourth, he describes a Kantian critique of aesthetic experience. A perennial classic in the SPEP series, the work is rounded out by a detailed "Translator's Foreword" especially helpful to readers in (...) aesthetics interested in the context and circumstances around which the original was published as well as the phenomenological background of the book. (shrink)

Yet such a contrast fails to provide an adequate account of the full scope of either philosophy or psychoanalysis. On the one hand, philosophical inquiry is not wholly pre-empted by the question of reality; it may also extend into the realm of phantasy, as can be seen in Plato's effort to determine the epistemological value of eikasia or in Husserl's consideration of Phantasie as a basis of insight into essences. On the other hand, psychoanalysts are as concerned about reality as (...) they are about phantasy. Indeed, one of the key phrases of psychoanalytic therapy is "adaptation to reality." The reason for this concern with reality is clear: if phantasies are modifications or distortions of the real, it is imperative to discern what the character of reality is, especially since it is held out as the standard of a sound state of mental health. (shrink)

What is bound to mislead us is the dichotomist assumption that keeping in mind must be either an entirely active or an utterly passive affair. This assumption has plagued theories of memory as of other mental activities. On the activist model, keeping in mind would be a creating or recreating in mind of what is either a mere mirage to begin with or a set of stultified sensations. Much as God in the seventeenth century was sometimes thought to operate by (...) continual creation, so the mind was given the same lofty powers in the Romantic thought that represented a reaction to much of what the seventeenth century stood for. But the activist model is by no means limited to the Romantic idealists or Natur-philosophen. It reappears in more than one phase of phenomenology, and it informs the sober theorizing of Bartlett and Piaget on the nature of remembering. On the passivist model, on the other hand, the mind is mute and unconfigurating. It takes in but does not give back other than what it takes in. It is a recording mechanism only. Something like this view is at work in empiricist theories of memory, considered as restricted to the contents of Humean "impressions" and arranged according to their order and position in time; it continues in Kant's notion of "reproductive imagination" as operating by association alone; and it is found flourishing today in psychological accounts of what is revealingly called "human associative memory.". (shrink)

THE FATES of perceiving and remembering have been inextricably intertwined in Western philosophy and psychology. It has been asserted from Plato’s Theaetetus onwards that there can be no remembering without perceiving and, though much less frequently, no perceiving without remembering of some sort. Just how either of these forms of interdependency occurs, however, has given rise to continual controversy. Little discernible progress has been made since Plato first proposed, in the Theaetetus, a model of the mind as an aviary in (...) which individual memories wait like captive birds to be plucked from the cage of recollection in order to aid in the identification of present perceptions. The elaborate and ingenious character of this memory machine—elaborate and ingenious in comparison with the simpler model of the wax tablet also proposed in the Theaetetus—was to prove prophetic, since later treatments of perception often invoke memory as a deus ex machina brought in to resolve ambiguities and perplexities of perceptual experience. (shrink)