This groundbreaking inquiry into the centrality of place in Martin Heidegger`s thinking offers not only an illuminating reading of Heidegger`s thought but a detailed investigation into the way in which the concept of place relates to core philosophical issues. In Heidegger`s Topology, Jeff Malpas argues that an engagement with place, explicit in Heidegger`s later work, informs Heidegger`s thought as a whole. What guides Heidegger`s thinking, Malpas writes, is a conception of philosophy`s starting point: our finding ourselves already "there," situated in the world, in "place". Heidegger`s concepts of being and place, he argues, are inextricably bound together.

Malpas follows the development of Heidegger`s topology through three stages: the early period of the 1910s and 1920s, through Being and Time, centered on the "meaning of being"; the middle period of the 1930s into the 1940s, centered on the "truth of being"; and the late period from the mid-1940s on, when the "place of being" comes to the fore. (Malpas also challenges the widely repeated arguments that link Heidegger`s notions of place and belonging to his entanglement with Nazism.) The significance of Heidegger as a thinker of place, Malpas claims, lies not only in Heidegger`s own investigations but also in the way that spatial and topographic thinking has flowed from Heidegger`s work into that of other key thinkers of the past 60 years.

AUTHOR:
Jeff Malpas is Distinguished Professor at the University of Tasmania and Distinguished Visiting Professor at Latrobe University. He is the author of Heidegger`s Topology: Being, Place, World and Heidegger and the Thinking of Place: Explorations in the Topology of Being, both published by the MIT Press.