Peter speaks with the Australian philosopher Jeff Malpas, emeritus distinguished professor at the University of Tasmania, whose work explores the fundamental role the appearance of place plays in understanding who and what we are. Malpas is the author of numerous books and essays including Place and Experience (Cambridge University Press, 1999) and In the Brightness of Place: Topological Thinking with and After Heidegger (SUNY Press, 2022). In a world increasingly forgetful of the place where we are, Malpas invites us to attend to the “inevitable and unavoidable embeddedness in the environing world where we find ourselves and which determines what we are.”

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Timestamps:

(00:00) Introduction

(00:53) Where is Jeff Malpas?

(05:32) Who is Jeff Malpas?

(12:26) How are Malpas’s ideas different from those of his contemporary Edward S. Casey?

(20:48) Why is Marcel Proust so important to a philosopher of place?

(24:55) Continental Philosophy vs Analytic Philosophy

(28:02) Hermeneutics vs Phenomenology

(35:43) How is place inseparable from who we are?

(45:38) Where is here? Where is the place where we are?

(49:47) The problem with associating the concept of place with the notion of the transcendental 

(58:31) The body is not the foundation of place

(1:05:41) How does our placedness precede social and political constructions of place?

(1:07:00) The problematics of place and the controversy of Heidegger’s Nazism

(1:15:46) The forgetting of place

(1:22:17) How does the problem of God fit into the question of place?

(1:35:03) The remembrance of place

(1:42:15) The temporality of place

(1:45:40) The ethics of belonging