The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History

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We may talk of virtual reality and speak in virtual conversations, but we simply can't help actually occupying a concrete place. Long marginalized by philosophers, the idea of place is here rescued from the dustbins of philosophical history in a meticulous tracing of the idea of place from the immanent categories of Aristotle, to the Enlightenment dissolution of place into space, and to Martin Heidegger's reclamation of place from space. Edward Casey leads us through rocky and challenging terrain to a destination that already has been profitably mined for its literary riches by the likes of Gary Snyder and William Kittredge. The Fate of Place is a welcome addition and sure to be influential.


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Not merely a presentation of the ideas of other thinkers, 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 from philosophical thought 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, Locke, 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. His book will interest philosophers, environmentalists, architects, art historians, and readers in cultural and literary studies.


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