Introduction: Situatedness and Place

2018

Over the last two or three decades, the spatio-temporal contingency of human life has become an important topic of research in a broad range of different disciplines including the social sciences, the cultural sciences, the cognitive sciences, and philosophy. Significantly, however, this research topic is referred to in quite different ways: While some researchers refer to it in terms of the “situatedness” of human experience and action, others refer to it in terms of “place”, emphasizing the “power of place” and advocating a “topological” or “topographical turn” in the context of a larger “spatial turn”. In this chapter, we will first give a short introduction to place and situatedness as …

Place and Positionality – Anthropo(topo)logical Thinking with Helmuth Plessner

2018

This paper explores a possible anthropological dimension of place by providing an interpretation of Helmuth Plessner’s philosophical approach which proposes to understand it as a twofold “implacement” of man – discussing both the place of man in the natural world and man’s specific relation to place that makes him take his place in the natural world. The interpretation follows Plessner’s idea of a natural set of stages, developed in his major work Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch, leading from inanimate objects to plants, animals, and humans. According to Plessner, each stage differs from the other by virtue of its respective spatial delineation toward, and its position in, the wor…

Narrative and Place

2017

The purpose of this chapter is to explore possible intersections between place and narrative, questioning an understanding that simply associates place with space and narrative with time and infers their separation from that. After introducing two directions from which the problem can be addressed, namely the role of place for the phenomena analyzed in terms of narrative, on the one hand, and the role of narrative for the understanding of place, on the other, the text pursues the first perspective and explores the relation between place and narrative with regard to the theory of the self, ethics, the theory of action and history. The concluding section briefly discusses the way narrative in…

Erratum to: Narrative and Place

2018