1. Introduction.- Part 1: Elements of Hermeneutics, Place, and Space.- 2. Understanding Place.- 3. Is Place a Text?.- 4. Narrative and Place.- 5. An Eco-Echo-Philopoetics of Dialog and Place: Why and When Should Language Alert and Alter Itself?.- 6. Suspended in Mid-Air: Casting Nets and Making Places Between Earth and Sky at Meteora.- 7. Action-Space and Time: Towards an Enactive Hermeneutics.- 8. Hermeneutics of Play – Hermeneutics of Place: On Play, Style, and Dream.- 9. A Hermeneutics of the Body in Health and Illness.- 10. Place and Non-Place: A Phenomenological Perspective.- 11. Topos Unbound: From Place to Opening and Back.- 12. The Configuration of Space through Architecture in the Thinking of Gadamer.- 13. Space and Narrative: Ricoeur and a Hermeneutic Reading of Place.- 14. Gaston Bachelard’s Places of the Imagination and Images of Space.- 15. Merleau-Ponty's Hermeneutic Reflections on Certainty and Place: Science and Art.- 16. Hannah Arendt’s Multi-Perspectivism and the Tension Between Place and Space.- 17. Lefebvre, Hermeneutics and Place.- 18. Discourse, Power, and Place: Foucault’s Epistemic Position.- 19. A Place for James J. Gibson.- 20. Tuanian Geography.- 21. Edward Casey: Subliminal Hermeneutics in the Wake of Place.- 22. Jeff Malpas: The Tireless Attentive Explorer of Place, Situation and Boundary.- Part 2 Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Spaces of the Hermeneutic of Place and Space.- 23. Towards Topopoetics: Space Place and the Poem.- 24. When the “Here and Now” is Nowhere.- 25. Hermeneutics and Architecture: Buildings-in-Themselves and Interpretive Trustworthiness.- 26. The Mental Life of the Metropolis.- 27. The Hermeneutics of the Urban Spatial Sociologies of Simmel, Benjamin and Lefebvre.- 28. Toward an Anthropological Understanding of Space and Place.- 29. Hermeneutics of Place and Space: A Geographical Perspective.- 30. Hermeneutics, Place and Environment.- 31. Psychology and Lived Space: Woodland Paths and the Pathic.- 32. Being on the Edge: Body, Place, Climate.- 33. Digital Virtual Places: Utopias, Atopias, Heterotopias.- 34. A Woman’s Place: Place-Based Theory, Hermeneutics, and Feminism.- 35. Race as a Historico-Spatial Construct: The Hermeneutical Challenge to Institutional Racism.- 36. Inattentiveness to Place: The Case of South African Philosophy.- 37. Thinking Across Cultures: Western Hermeneutics and Chinese Exegesis.
Bruce Janz is Professor of Humanities in the Department of Philosophy, Director of the Center for Humanities and Digital Research, and a graduate faculty member in the Texts and Technologies Ph.D. program at the University of Central Florida. He works in contemporary European and African philosophy, as well as in cultural theory, digital humanities, and environmental thought. He has researched and taught in Canada, the US, Kenya, and South Africa.
This book analyzes the hermeneutics of place, raising questions about central issues such as textuality, dialogue, and play. It discusses the central figures in the development of hermeneutics and place, and surveys disciplines and areas in which a hermeneutic approach to place has been fruitful. It covers the range of philosophical hermeneutic theory, both within philosophy itself as well as from other disciplines. In doing so, the volume reflects the state of theorization on these issues, and also looks forward to the implications and opportunities that exist. Philosophical hermeneutics has fundamentally altered philosophy’s approach to place. Issues such as how we dwell in place, how place is imagined, created, preserved, and lost, and how philosophy itself exists in place have become central. While there is much research applying hermeneutics to place, there is little which both reflects on that heritage and critically analyzes a hermeneutic approach to place. This book fills that void by offering a sustained analysis of the central elements, major figures, and disciplinary applications of hermeneutics and place.