Between Geography and Philosophy: What Does It Mean to Be in the Place-World?

Abstract

remarkable convergence between geography and philosophy has become increasingly manifest in the past two decades. It is as if Strabo’s celebrated opening claim in his Geographia had finally become true two millennia later: “The science of Geography, which I now propose to investigate, is, I think, quite as much as any other science, a concern of the philosopher” (Strabo I, 3). What is new (and not in Strabo) is the growing conviction that philosophy is the concern of the geographer as well, or more exactly that philosophy and geography now need each other—and profit from this mutual need. Collaboration between the two fields has been evident ever since concerted attention to place began to emerge just over twenty years ago in, e.g., Edward Relph’s Place and Placelessness (1976) and Yi-Fu Tuan’s Space and Place (1976). Because of their emphasis on the experiential features of place—its “subjective” or “lived” aspects— such works were natural allies of phenomenology, a form of philosophy that attempts to give a direct description of first-person experience. Both geography and phenomenology have come to focus on place as experienced by human beings, in contrast to space, whose abstractness discourages experiential explorations. In the case of geography, a primary task has been to do justice to the indispensability of place in geographic theory and practice. So much is this the case that Robert David Sack (1997, 34, 30), a more recent proponent of the importance of place, can claim unhesitatingly that “[in geography] the truly important factor is place and its relationship to space.” 1