Abstract
“Place” and “situation” are often confounded in everyday discourse; yet they have crucially different dimensions. Place is locatory and singular, and is the outcome of bodily engagement: to be a lived body is to be in place; and to be in place is to be there by way of body. Situation contributes scope and setting to place itself. In particular, it brings temporality and historicity to bear on place, broadening it and making it more reflective of vicissitudes to which it is subject. Situations occur primarily as events that unfold in time as well as space. They call upon acts of synthesis, imagination, and freedom in their full realization. Place and situation belong together even as they are distinguishable in these various ways.
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Notes
- 1.
“Just as there is no place without body… so there is no body without place” (Casey 2009, p. 104).
- 2.
On this debate, see Casey (1997), especially chapters five and ten.
- 3.
Sartre italicizes the first use of “situation.”
- 4.
See ibid., p. 627: “situation is the common product of the contingency of the in-itself and of freedom… [it is] an ambiguous phenomenon.”
References
Aristotle. 1983. Aristotle’s Physics Books III and IV. Trans. E. Hussey. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Casey, E.S. 1997. The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History. Berkeley: University of California Press.
———. 2009. Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Sartre, J-P. 1966. Being and Nothingness. Trans. Hazel Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press.
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Casey, E.S. (2018). Place and Situation. In: Hünefeldt, T., Schlitte, A. (eds) Situatedness and Place. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 95. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92937-8_2
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