Philosophical Topography

This study focuses on the exegesis of Gregory of Nyssa, a 4th century exegete, a Church Father, and one of the three Cappadocian Fathers. The main primary source of my thesis is Gregory’s treatise The Life of Moses, an intriguing example of Patristic exegesis based on the Exodus narrative. The main purpose of Gregory’s treatise is not to make a historical presentation of the journey of Moses and the Israelites, but to elevate the reader into a higher state of consciousness in order to perceive the spiritual meaning of the narrative. The kind of exegesis that Gregory applies is often defined as allegorical interpretation or allegorical exegesis, rich on symbols and enigmas, which was at first neglected in scholarly discussion. Fortunately, there has been a growing interest in Biblical interpretation of the Church Fathers since the mid-20th century. The main objective of my thesis is to focus on Gregory’s interpretations of topographical imagery presented in the Exodus narrative. Greg...

This study focuses on the exegesis of Gregory of Nyssa, a 4th century exegete, a Church Father, and one of the three Cappadocian Fathers. The main primary source of my thesis is Gregory’s treatise The Life of Moses, an intriguing example of Patristic exegesis based on the Exodus narrative. The main purpose of Gregory’s treatise is not to make a historical presentation of the journey of Moses and the Israelites, but to elevate the reader into a higher state of consciousness in order to perceive the spiritual meaning of the narrative. The kind of
exegesis that Gregory applies is often defined as allegorical interpretation or allegorical exegesis, rich on symbols and enigmas, which was at first neglected in scholarly discussion.
Fortunately, there has been a growing interest in Biblical interpretation of the Church Fathers since the mid-20th century. The main objective of my thesis is to focus on Gregory’s interpretations of topographical
imagery presented in the Exodus narrative. Gregory gives symbolical interpretations to topographical locations: the city, the river, the sea, the desert and the mountain. My intention is to show that Gregory was not thinking of the various symbolical interpretations as independent units but he was seeking for a logical coherent sequence. One of the main objectives of modern research has been the reassessment of Gregory’s
sources. In order to understand Gregory’s exegetical and philosophical concepts and terminology, one must be aware of the rich and profound tradition already established in classical antiquity. Gregory makes moral, ascetical, philosophical and mystical interpretations in relation to each topographical detail. These figurative interpretations are by
no means based on his original ideas but are rooted in the rich tradition of Greek classical culture, as well as in the exegetical tradition of his Jewish and Christian predecessors. My purpose is to provide a systematic analysis of each term Gregory is applying and present an
overall model of Gregory’s exegetical method. The final aim of my thesis is to present an analysis of Gregory’s pattern of topographical
symbols as a whole. Gregory connects the topographical details with his threefold pattern of illumination, purification and participation in a fascinating way. For Gregory, the exodus narrative is a journey of a soul being liberated from the bondage of passions, temptations and
materialism towards an ever-increasing awareness of God’s presence.

This paper addresses a range of issues relating to the reading of Heidegger's  Back Notebooks. It thus approaches the Notebooks from a hermeneutical perspective, although it also considers the issue of the way Heidegger's thinking during the period in which Notebooks II-XV were written is connected with his later thought.

"Where are we when we think?", asks Hannah Arendt, and her answer, apparently,  is "nowhere". Indeed, she seems to suggest that the very way in which this question is framed is itself misguided or mistaken, and so seems to go on to replace the question about the place of thinking with an inquiry into the time of thinking. But Arendt's own investigation of the temporality at issue here nevertheless arrives at a mode of temporality that itself appears as a form of place or topos. Beginning with some of the problems Arendt's account seems initially to present, but moving on to an examination of the underlying direction in which that account moves, the discussion will thus explore the underlying topology that, in spite of appearances to the contrary, is at work in Arendt's account of thinking.

Onur Karamercan, Heidegger'de Sanat Eserinin Yeri: Sanal Müzeler Çağında Sanat ve Mekân adlı yazısında, iki yıldır yaşamakta olduğumuz salgınla birlikte çok daha sık biçimde görülmeye başlayan “sanal müze” veya “elektronik müze” uygulamalarına yakından bakar. Dünyanın en meşhur müzelerinin ve sanat galerilerinin sanatsal ve kültürel etkinliklerden mahrum kalmak istemeyen ziyaretçilerine "kapılarını" elektronik ortamda açtığı ve birçok müzenin de koleksiyonlarını tamamen ya da kısmen dijitalleştirdiği bu ortamda, şu iki soruyu yanıtlamayı açıklar: 1) Bir mekân olarak bir müzeyi uzaktan ziyaret etmek ve bir müzede sergilenen sanat eserlerini internet üzerinden “deneyimlemek” ne anlama gelmektedir ve 2) bu estetik-dijital “deneyim” (Erlebnis) insanın sanat ve mekân ile olan ilişkisi ve sanat eserinin “tecrübesine” (Erfahrung) dair ne söylemektedir?

Architecture has always stood in an important relation to power.  This paper explores that relationship through an investigation of contemporary verticality in architecture. The discussion focuses especially on the problematic relationship to the street that is part of vertical construction, as well as on the relation between architecture and technology that such construction brings to the fore.

This unpublished essay explores the way the frequently noted association between horror and fascination is tied to the eeriness or uncanniness that arises in the experience of place and landscape. Central to my argument is the idea that the real connection between horror and fascination is founded in our essential embeddedness in place – an embeddedness that is sometimes manifest in a form of melancholia (most obvious in the experience of nostalgia), but in its more extreme forms carries over into a horror from which we are nevertheless unable to turn away.

The aim of this paper is to explore some of the spatial, and especially the topological character of understanding, and so also to explore the connection between hermeneutics and what I have elsewhere referred to as philosophical topology or topography.  My argument will be directed at showing that not only is understanding imbued with the spatial and the topological, but that hermeneutics is itself essentially topological in character.

Topography or topology is a mode of philosophical thinking that combines elements of transcendental and hermeneutic approaches. It is anti-reductionist and relationalist in its ontology, and draws heavily, if sometimes indirectly, on ideas of situation, locality, and place. Such a topography or topology is present in Heidegger and, though less explicitly, in Hegel. It is also evident in many other recent and contemporary post-Kantian thinkers in addition to Kant himself. A key idea within such a topography or topology is that of triangulation – an idea that appears explicitly in the work of Donald Davidson. Triangulation captures the idea of the topographical domain as constituted through the mutual relatedness of the elements within it, and as only to be understood through the mapping out of such relatedness – in the case of the topographical domain that is the world, through the relatedness of self, other, and thing.

The publication of Heidegger's 'Black Notebooks' has aroused a storm of controversy that has often obscured any more sober assessment of the volumes. This essay provides a brief overview of the Notebooks and their significance, with special regard to the development in Heidegger's thinking for which they provide important new evidence.

This paper explores the difference between the notions of place and placedness. This difference relates to an important point of differentiation between genuinely a topographical approach and those other approaches that tend to dominate in the existing literature, including approaches associated with ‘situated cognition’.  If place is taken as the primary concept, as I argue it should be taken,  then that means that being-placed, as it might be viewed as determinative of experience and cognition, has first to be understood in relation to place.

If it is understood, as it all too often is, as that which stands apart from and over against the human, then there is no ‘nature’ in Heidegger. Moreover, if it is understood as a commitment to the idea that what can be said about the world and about nature itself is exhausted by what can be said within the discourse of the so-called  ‘natural sciences’ , then there is no ‘naturalism’ in Heidegger either. In these respects Heidegger can be seen to stand opposed to both ‘nature’ and ‘naturalism’. Yet both ways of understanding ‘nature’ and ‘naturalism’ at issue here, while commonplace, fail to do justice to what ‘nature’ and ‘naturalism’ might nevertheless carry within them – and as Heidegger stands against one conception of ‘nature’ and ‘naturalism’, so he can also be said to take a stand in favour of a different conception. Attending to Heidegger’s own understanding of ‘nature’ as determined by the Greek physis, and attending also to what is suggested even in the Latin natura, I shall explore a different reading of both ‘nature’ and ‘naturalism’: one that acknowledges the connection between ‘nature’ and ‘being' and 'nature' and 'place', as well as between the ‘natural’ and a certain sense of the ‘transcendental’; that is suggestive of a form of anti-naturalism as at the heart of the ‘naturalism’ that is associated with much contemporary ‘natural science’ (and so also with the many philosophical ‘naturalisms’ deriving from it, including those prevalent with much environmental thinking); and that also brings to the fore the question of nature as itself directly tied up, not only with the question of being, but also with the relation between being and human being.

Every place is singular, having a character that is proper to it alone. It is partly this singularity that underlies the often maligned and frequently over-used idea of the 'sense of place'. To understand place is, in large part, to understand the singularity that belongs to place – indeed, without an understanding of singularity, there can be no understanding of place. It is the exploration of this singularity, and so of the implications for place of its singularity, that is the aim of this essay.

How does topos stand in relation to chora? Does the one provide a counter to the other, even an implicit critique of it? What is the relation between a topology of the sort that can be found in Heidegger, and what might be termed the 'chorology' present in the deconstructive project of Derrida? Responding to a very generous discussion of my work by Peter Gratton, this paper explores the notions of both topos and chora, as well as setting out five key claims that underpin my thinking of place - a thinking that is chorological at the same time as it is topological.

Although Heidegger’s explicit account of “poetic dwelling” belongs to his later philosophy, there are important indications that he was already engaging with the core matter of the notion in his early thought. Contrary to the idea that in Being and Time, “dwelling” amounts to mere practical coping with the environment, we would like to demonstrate that the notion is already a poetic issue in his early thought, as it requires the appropriation of our relation to the world via an authentic experience of fin- itude. Following a topological mode of thinking, the paper thematizes the connections between Heidegger’s early and later thought, and elucidates the following three points: First, “freeing” and “letting” appears as the appropriate ethos of a poetic experience of finitude, one that maintains the “clearing” of meaningfulness. Second, a topological reading of Being and Time can explicate the notions of authenticity and inauthenticity as different disclosures of the clearing where human being-world correlation occurs. Third, the notion of “keeping-still” (Schweigen) can be interpreted as an authentic disposition that frees space for the disclosure of existence. The paper concludes that an authentic experience of finitude through “stillness” appears to reorient human ethos by releasing “discourse” from absorption in “idle-talk” and that such an act of existential re-orientation of one’s disposition towards the world is the essence of “authenticity,” and Heidegger’s early “poetic dwelling”.

Keywords: Heidegger, Being and Time, poetic dwelling, finitude, Gelassenheit, silence, authenticity, topology.

Emotion is central to the life of the subject, but emotion is no mere modification of subjectivity taken on its own. Rather emotion is an essential part of the structure that opens up the subject to the objective and to the world. In phenomenological terms, emotion is essentially disclosive of the world. Yet in being so, emotion is also tied to the felt bodily locatedness – the 'being-placed' – of the subject. Emotion thus belongs not to phenomenology alone, but to the essential topology of the human, and as part of that topology, emotion belongs to the externality of things no less than to the internality of the self. On this basis, we can better understand the relation of emotion to the materiality of human life (the material is always 'felt' and the 'felt' is always materialised), as well as the character of emotion as itself a mode of orientation – a finding of oneself as in the world in a certain way. Only in this latter fashion, in fact, can one find oneself in the world at all.

The western is the only fully-fledged film genre defined by geographical location. Yet does this mean that place, or a sense of place, plays a more significant role in the Western than in other film genres? On the face of it, it would seem that it does not. For the most part, place typically appears in the Western as little more than the scenic background to the action that is the real thread of the film – and sometimes, even the generic character of many Western locations, it is not even especially scenic. Yet there are aspects of the way place figures in the Western, or in particular Westerns, that does suggest the possibility that place can take on a more significant and complex role in the Western, and that there may, after all, be such a thing as a “Western” sense of place.  Taking George Stevens' Shane as an example, this essay will explore the way place figures in one of the classic films of the genre.

Der Workshop setzt sich zum Ziel, Möglichkeiten topologischen Denkens in der Literatur und für die Literaturwissenschaft zu erkunden. Er greift damit aktuelle Diskussionen um die Konzeptualisierung von Räumlichkeit als einem nicht mehr territorial bestimmten, sondern zugleich virtuell und materiell-medial konstituierten Relationierungsphänomen auf. Seine Ausrichtung ist eine grundlegend doppelte: Zum einen will er auf einer systematisch-methodologischen Ebene topologische Zugänge und Lektürepraktiken für die Literaturwissenschaft entwickeln. Dabei gilt es nicht zuletzt, mögliche Probleme interdisziplinärer Begriffs- und Modelltransfers mit ihren theore¬tischen Implikationen in den Blick zu bekommen und diese auch in ihrer historischen Situiertheit zu reflektieren. Zum anderen zielen wir aber vor allem auch auf literarische Texte, die selbst topologisch operieren und damit ihre eigene Textualität und ihre Ein¬bindung in materielle Textpraktiken problematisieren. Ausgehend von einem engeren Textbegriff, der in seiner multiplen semiotischen Dimensionalität tropologisch gedacht werden soll, wollen wir zudem über topologische Konzeptualisierungen von Relationalität in einen interdisziplinären Dialog treten. Auf diese Weise soll eine umfassendere epistemische Kontextualisierung geschehen, die sich u.a. mit folgenden Fragen auseinandersetzt: Warum ist die Topologie in unserer zeitgenössischen Kultur so zentral? Wie manifestieren sich Relationen? Wie bilden sie konkrete Elemente aus und gehen im Prozess der Aktualisierung andere und anders geartete Relationen ein? Wie verhalten sich Formen und Figuren zu ihrer Materialisierung? Wie kann man Relationalität denken?

History, it is routinely assumed, belongs primarily to time and the temporal. Yet although routine, the assumption is nevertheless mistaken. It is place or topos, which encompasses both time and space (and that is intimately tied to the notion of bound or limit), that is primary here, and so history has to be understood as determined topologically, and not merely temporally. The exploration and elaboration of this claim involves rethinking the ideas of time, space, and place as well as of language and narrative. History appears in its adventual character, but its adventuality is itself seen as a happening of place.

I now have all my papers, with a searchable index, available on my personal website at jeffmalpas.com. I will still be uploading papers to academia.edu, but my personal website will be the more definitive and reliable location on which to find my work

In this essay + film I present some of the key theoretical arguments generated through making 3xShapes of Home (2020). The text and the film is derived from a larger study on Essay Film as Topography, and develops what I call  topographical thinking through the moving image, drawing on the philosophical topography of Jeff Malpas and the discourse on Essay Film. The full text and film is available online.

This paper sets out an account of hermeneutics as essentially 'topological' in character (where 'topology' is understood as designating the philosophical inquiry into place) at the same time as it also argues that hermeneutics has a key role to play in making clear the nature of the topological. At the centre of the argument is the idea that place and understanding are intimately connected, that this is what determines the interconnection between topology and hermeneutics, and that this also implies an intimate belonging-together of place and thinking, of place and experience, of place and the very possibility of appearance, of presence, of being.

Written in honour of Joseph Fell, and acknowledging Fell's ground-breaking work  in opening up the topic of Heidegger's  thinking of place, this essay connects Fell's work with my own  project of philosophical topology or topography. The latter project is one that encompasses Heidegger’s thought, but also aims to go beyond it. In making the connection with Fell’s work, may aim is to explore, if only briefly, some of what I take to be the broader implications of a philosophical orientation, or re-orientation, that takes place as its central focus.