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)

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.

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.

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)

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)

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)

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 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)

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)

It is remarkable how much we can understand about an environmental problem at a mere glance. By means of a glance - at once quick and comprehensive - we can detect that something is going wrong in a given environmental circumstance, and we can even begin to suspect what needs to be done to rectify the situation. In this paper I explore the unsuspected power of the glance in environmental thought and practice, drawing special lessons for an ethics of the (...) environment. Specific examples are analyzed, and authors as diverse as John Dewey and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari are invoked in an effort to develop a coherent vision of how the human glance helps to locate and remedy environmental crises. (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.

Contrary to popular belief, professional philosophers want and need to be heard. Lacking a large and general public in this country, they turn to audiences of peers and rivals. But these audiences are found either in giant, unfocused professional bodies, or in restrictive groups of specialists. In this respect, the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy can claim a unique role among academic organizations in this country. Now in its tenth year, it has become one of the most important forums (...) in America for the open exchange of ideas. The Society has grown considerably since its founding, and its annual meetings attract scholars in philosophy and other disciplines from across the country and abroad. But these meetings differ markedly from others: too large to be dominated by any single clique or doctrine, they are at the same time small enough to encourage lively discussion within its organized sessions and not just in the corridors outside. The Society derives its focus from the two closely allied philosophical "directions" indicated in its title. Yet from the beginning it has included in its meetings a sizeable number of contributors who are not identified with or even sympathetic to these directions, but are at least willing to engage in a dialogue with those who are. Furthermore, the Society has accomplished to a limited degree something rare indeed in American intellectual life: an interdisciplinary ex- 2 INTRODUCTION change. (shrink)

The activities of glancing and attending are rarely compared, yet they have significant affinities to the point where we may say that glancing is a mode of attending while the latter, in turn, often proceeds by glances. This paper explores these affinities, showing that each activity is a form of reactive spontaneity (James) and that each engages in a particular version of advertence. Mental as well as ordinary perceptual glances are examined, with examples being taken from laboratory studies, everyday life, (...) meditation, and the psychotherapeutic technique of focusing. In the end, the two acts collaborate closely, enhance each other, and can be considered conterminous in many of their aims and procedures for reaching them. (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)

This essay begins by situating the work of David Carr in relation to the reception of phenomenology in the United States. It addresses Carr's early contributions to the philosophy of history, especially as this topic emerges in Husserl's middle and later writings. The idea of point of view as this emerges in Carr's own writings on history is examined, with special attention to differences between its spatial and temporal instantiations. Carr's emphasis on the primacy of temporality in human experience is (...) contrasted with an approach that is more appreciative of the role of place in this experience. It is suggested that place offers an important alternative to time as a basis for the understanding of history and narrative. (shrink)

Are emotions internal episodes – psychical or neurological – as is often claimed? Some certainly are; but I maintain that an important class of emotions are “peripheral”; by this I mean that they consist in what we pick up from others’ expressions of their emotions in words, gestures, or actions – or from surrounding circumstances of various sorts. These expressions and circumstances contain affect clusters that manifest themselves to us exophanously, literally “showings-forth.” I explore both of these basic situations of (...) “the transmission of affect”. I also present an abbreviated periphenomenological description of various ways in which emotions have their own peculiar edges, thereby correcting and supplementing the common conception that edges inhere only in physical objects. (shrink)

It is a modernist article of faith that emotion belongs to the human subject—that it is possessed by this subject from within. We find this view espoused by thinkers as various as Descartes, Hume, and Kant. It is also found in the conventional belief that emotions have their seat “in the heart.” In this essay I explore an alternative paradigm whereby emotion exists as much, if not more, at the outer edges of the subject: in expressive gestures and other forms (...) of what I call “exophany,” i.e., the showing-forth of emotion from without. Instead of concerning ourselves with the endogeny of emotions—its internal generation in the body, brain, or soul—I look at the peripherality of emotions. Examining concrete examples, I demonstrate that emotions are transmissible thanks to their capacity for being located at the edges of our lives. (shrink)

"Edges and the In-Between" analyzes the phenomenon of the in-between in terms of the space (or better, place) that is found in the midst of edges. These edges are of two sorts, borders and boundaries, but the latter are favored in the case of the in-between, which is a realm or region of indeterminate extent where things and events are located and where inhabitation occurs. A comparison with Heidegger shows the in-between to be itself situated between "Earth" and "World" as (...) well as among its own boundaried edges. The primary example examined here is art, especially painting; but the application of the model of the in-between is much broader than this, as future writings on this topic by the author will attempt to demonstrate. (shrink)

L’étude entend montrer que, si le temps est finalement unique, l’espace, lui, est originellement (et non du fait de la constitution de l’être-au-monde) multiple. Une analyse d’un passage du Timée où la Chôra est dite tithênê (nourrice) permet d’asseoir une interprétation de la différence foncière entre espace et lieu. Le lieu a progressivement disparu pour s’absorber dans l’espace neutre qui traduit homologiquement l’infinité divine ou pour s’atténuer dans le site. Il est difficile de trouver une analyse adéquate du lieu depuis (...) la mort de Leibniz (1916) jusqu’à la thèse de Bergson en latin sur la notion aristotélicienne de lieu. (shrink)

L’étude entend montrer que, si le temps est finalement unique, l’espace, lui, est originellement (et non du fait de la constitution de l’être-au-monde) multiple. Une analyse d’un passage du Timée où la Chôra est dite tithênê (nourrice) permet d’asseoir une interprétation de la différence foncière entre espace et lieu. Le lieu a progressivement disparu pour s’absorber dans l’espace neutre qui traduit homologiquement l’infinité divine ou pour s’atténuer dans le site. Il est difficile de trouver une analyse adéquate du lieu depuis (...) la mort de Leibniz (1916) jusqu’à la thèse de Bergson en latin sur la notion aristotélicienne de lieu. (shrink)