Heidegger's philosophy of space and place

Abstract

The purpose of Martin Heidegger's Being and Time ( BT ) is to recover the experience of Being that lies concealed behind the dominant modes of Western thought. BT represents a well-founded phenomenological attempt to interpret the everyday understanding of Being that Dasein always already has. Much of the contemporary discourse in human and social geography, such as on class, race and gender, centres on issues that can generally be described as grounded within a socio-political context. However, while recognising their value, these approaches are often unsatisfactory in that they fail to consider Dasein's Being-in-the-World as a unique and peculiar phenomenological problem. Dasein's spatiality is used expressly to establish that Dasein is spatial and Dasein can be spatial only as care. Dasein's spatiality, or place, expresses the bounded and lived spatiality that characterizes Being-in-the-World. Heidegger's body of philosophy should be of great interest to geographers in their attempts to understand themselves as part of the studies of the interaction between man and world. This is what hermeneutic phenomenology is all about, and is what geographers such as Edward Relph, Yi-Fu Tuan and John Pickles try to tell us in their many works on humanism, phenomenology and geography.