Jeff Malpas

According to Quine the inscrutability of reference leads to ontological relativity, or, as Donald Davidson calls it, relativity of reference. Davidson accepts both inscrutability and the indeterminacy of translation which it grounds, but rejects any explicit relativity of reference or ontology. The reasons behind this rejection are set out and explained. Explicit relativization is shown to be at odds with indeterminacy. Some notion of the relativity of reference (or, more generally, interpretation) is nevertheless shown to be both possible and necessary. It is, however, a relativity which is compatible with commensurability — the idea of absolute incommeasurability is ruled out along with the realist ideal of universal commensuration — as well as with indeterminacy. The indeterminacy thesis itself undergoes some slight elaboration, particularly in respect of the notion of empirical equivalence. In general the resulting account is one which retains both the absolute character of truth and some sense of the relativity of ontology against the background of Davidsonian holism.

In a recent number of this journal there appeared an article by Niall Shanks and John King-Farlow on the theory of radical interpretation as developed by Donald Davidson. In that paper Davidson was presented as an opponent of “metaphysical openness in general [and] … idealism in particular” and as a philosopher who has “sought to silence all philosophically challenging talk both about the ordinary speaker’s systematic errors and about the claims of revisionary metaphysicians such as phenomenalists or absolute idealists.” I suspect that Davidson would be somewhat surprised by this description of himself. He might also wonder just what it means to be an “opponent of metaphysical openness in general.” Like any other philosopher, Davidson has his own views on matters philosophical; and, like other philosophers, he criticizes what he sees as false or mistaken in the views of others. One cannot help but suspect that what Davidson’s opposition to “metaphysical openness” really comes down to is his criticism of views associated with idealism.

Death and Philosophy presents a wide ranging and fascinating variety of different philosophical, aesthetic and literary perspectives on death. Death raises key questions such as whether life has meaning of life in the face of death, what the meaning of "life after death" might be and whether death is part of a narrative that can be retold in different ways, and considers the various types of death, such as brain death, that challenge mind-body dualism. The essays also include explorations of Chinese, Japanese and Tibetan perspectives on death and why death in some cultures, such as in Mexico's day of the dead, is celebrated.

J. E. Malpas discusses and develops the ideas of Donald Davidson, influential in contemporary thinking on the nature of understanding and meaning, and of truth and knowledge. He provides an account of Davidson's holistic and hermeneutical conception of linguistic interpretation, and, more generally, of the mind. Outlining its Quinean origins and the elements basic to Davidson's Radical Interpretation, J. E. Malpas' book goes on to elaborate this holism and to examine the indeterminacy of interpretation and the principle of charity. The metaphysical and epistemological consequences of Davidson's approach are considered, particularly in relation to scepticism and relativism, the realist/anti-realist debate, and the problem of truth. Parallels are drawn between the Davidsonian emphasis on the centrality of the notion of truth and Heidegger's notion of truth as aletheia, as the book looks to structuralist, hermeneutical and phenomenological sources to illuminate Davidson's position.

The venture into the public realm seems clear to me. One exposes oneself to the light of the public, as a person. Although I am of the opinion that one must not appear and act in public selfconsciously, still I know that in every action the person is expressed as in no other human activity. Speaking is also a form of action. That is one venture. The other is: we start something. We weave our strand into a network of relations. What comes of it we never know. We’ve all been taught to say: Lord forgive them, for they know not what they do. That is true of all action. Quite simply and concretely true, because one cannot know. That is what is meant by a venture. And now I would say that this venture is only possible when there is trust in people. A trust— which is difficult to formulate but fundamental—in what is human in all people. Otherwise such a venture could not be made (from the transcript of the interview of Hannah Arendt by Günther Gaus, 28 October 1964 – see EU).

There has been a strong tendency in recent years, in countries such as Australia and the United States, for governmental and corporate spokespersons to present advice and information that comes from independent scientific sources as if it were no better grounded than that from any other source. Such a leveling out of all advice and information into mere “opinion” has been a key strategy in the assertion of corporate and governmental control over public debate and policy. In this paper, we aim to explore some of the factors that diminish the credibility and reliability of information within organizational structures, effectively undermining the value of that information; we argue for the importance of processes like those of peer review in maintaining the credibility and reliability of information that is so important to effective action and decision; and we also provide an analysis of the rationale that underpins such processes. One of our conclusions will be that processes like those of peer review succeed largely because of the way in which they depend upon, but also support, the dispersal of information and authority within an organizational structure so as to ensure both that information is accessible within the structure and also remains open to challenge and scrutiny

It is often argued that there is a connection between certain forms of environmental or place-oriented thinking and conservative or reactionary politics. Frequently, the philosopher Martin Heidegger is taken to exemplify this connection through his own involvement with Nazism. In this essay, I explore the relations between Heidegger's thought and that of certain other key thinkers, principally the ethologist Jakob von Uexküll, and the geographers Friedrich Ratzel and Paul Vidal de la Blache, as well as with elements of Nazi ideology. While Heidegger, Ratzel and Vidal de la Blache are shown to have a similar commitment to a holistic conception of the relation between human being and the world, and to also give priority to ideas of geographic space, or, as we may also say, to place, this is shown to run counter to the essentially subjectivist and biologically determinist position that is associated with Nazi thinking on these matters, and that can also be seen as a key element in the work of von Uexküll. It is argued that the clarification of these issues is not only important for matters of intellectual history alone, but also to ongoing discussions about the role and significance of place. Given the influence of geographical considerations on contemporary historiography, as well as in a number of other disciplines, and given also the role played by Ratzel and Vidal de la Blache, as well as Heidegger, in the rise of such 'place-oriented' thinking, the exploration and clarification of the differences at issue here is especially important.

This volume brings together a range of interdisciplinary perspectives on a topic of central importance, but which has otherwise tended to be approached from within just one or another disciplinary framework. Most of the essays contained here incorporate some degree of interdisciplinarity in their own approach, but the volume nevertheless divides into three main sections: Philosophical considerations; Humanities approaches; Legal, medical, and therapeutic contexts. The volume includes essays by philosophers, medical practitioners and researchers, historians, lawyers, literary, Classical, and Judaic scholars. The essays are united by a common concern with the question of the human character of suffering, and the demands that suffering, and the recognition of suffering, make upon us.

Taking an image by Thomas Hoepker as its starting point, this essay examines the discontinuities and contradictions that appear around the contemporary rhetoric of the ‘event’ as given particular instantiation in the destruction of the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001. It is argued that the rhetoric at issue here, in spite of its emphasis on the ‘eventful’ character of our time, actually serves to conceal the urgency of our contemporary situation as well as disabling any genuine response to it.

What is the relation between our beliefs, or thoughts in general, and the perceptual experience of the world that gives rise to those beliefs? Donald Davidson is usually taken to have a well-known answer to this question that runs as follows: while our beliefs are, at least in part, caused by our experience, such experience does not thereby count as providing a rational ground for those beliefs; our beliefs are thus evidentially grounded in other beliefs, but not in the experience that gives rise to them. John McDowell, among others, has challenged this Davidsonian picture on the grounds that it actually severs the connection between beliefs and their proper evidential grounds. Against such a view, this paper argues the Davidsonian position grounds belief in the specificity of our own locatedness in the world, and in the more general and prior embeddedness of belief in the world that is a part of the very concept of belief.

The life of Gautama, who came to be known as the Buddha, the Enlightened One, is famously said to have been irrevocably changed by his experience of three things: poverty, old age, and death – it was this experience that started him on the road to enlightenment. There is no doubt that the encounter with death can be a life-changing experience, perhaps more so than either poverty or old-age, and not only because death may be construed as an especially powerful emblem of human suffering. Quite aside from the emotional impact of death, it would seem to have an inevitable and irreducible strangeness that challenges our sense of our own existence.

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. 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

On the one hand, most of us would take honesty to be a key ethical virtue. Corporations and other organizations often include it in their codes of ethics, we legislate against various forms of dishonesty, we tend to be ashamed (or at least defensive) when we are caught not telling the truth, and honesty is often regarded as a key element in relationships. Yet on the other hand, dishonesty, that is, lying and deceit, seems to be commonplace in contemporary public life even amongst those leading figures in our society whom we might otherwise take to be the exemplars of public virtue. So, is the emphasis on truth and honesty just a sham? Does the fact of our actual practice mean that truth and honesty matter only rhetorically, and, if so, does that mean that whatever it is we mean by ‘ethics,’ truth and honesty are not a part of it? What I will suggest is that truth is indeed central to ethical practice, and not only to ethical practice, but also to a properly democratic politics, and that the apparent breakdown in the commitment to truth in public life is indicative of a deeper ethical, as well as political, breakdown.

The idea of place--topos--runs through Martin Heidegger's thinking almost from the very start. It can be seen not only in his attachment to the famous hut in Todtnauberg but in his constant deployment of topological terms and images and in the situated, "placed" character of his thought and of its major themes and motifs. Heidegger's work, argues Jeff Malpas, exemplifies the practice of "philosophical topology." In Heidegger and the Thinking of Place, Malpas examines the topological aspects of Heidegger's thought and offers a broader elaboration of the philosophical significance of place. Doing so, he provides a distinct and productive approach to Heidegger as well as a new reading of other key figures--notably Kant, Aristotle, Gadamer, and Davidson, but also Benjamin, Arendt, and Camus. Malpas, expanding arguments he made in his earlier book _Heidegger's Topology_, discusses such topics as the role of place in philosophical thinking, the topological character of the transcendental, the convergence of Heideggerian topology with Davidsonian triangulation, the necessity of mortality in the possibility of human life, the role of materiality in the working of art, the significance of nostalgia, and the nature of philosophy as beginning in wonder. Philosophy, Malpas argues, begins in wonder and begins in place and the experience of place. The place of wonder, of philosophy, of questioning, he writes, is the very topos of thinking

Ted Relph’s review of Heidegger’s Topology acknowledges the importance of Heidegger’s thought in the contemporary turn to place within the Humanities and Social Sciences, just as it acknowledges the importance of the philosophical inquiry into place as such (Relph is also particularly generous in his estimation of the role of my work, in Heidegger’s Topology and elsewhere, in contributing to this). Moreover, Relph provides a strikingly apt and vivid image of the way the concept of ‘place’ has, in recent years, ‘exploded’ across many different areas and disciplines, in a proliferation of different forms and uses. While there are many works that deploy various senses of place, and that also delineate the detailed textures and forms of particular places, when it comes to the theoretical inquiry into place, the focus, for the most part, is not on place as such, but either on the effects of place or else on place as itself an effect of other processes. Thus David Harvey, as Relph notes, treats place as a social construction, claiming that the only interesting question then concerns the social processes that give rise to place (see Harvey, 1996: 293-4) – here place is nothing more than an effect; Doreen Massey, on the other hand, treats place, which she refuses to distinguish from space, as significant largely in terms of the consequences of our imagination of place (see Massey, 2005: esp. 5-8) – here it is the effects of place that are given priority. Even the work of a theorist such as Henri Lefebvre (see especially Lefebvre, 1991), so often cited as a key figure in the literature on place, turns out to be important, less for his elucidation of the concept, than..

While the 'sense of place' is a familiar theme in poetry and art, philosophers have generally given little or no attention to place and the human relation to place. In Place and Experience, Jeff Malpas seeks to remedy this by advancing an account of the nature and significance of place as a complex but unitary structure that encompasses self and other, space and time, subjectivity and objectivity. Drawing on a range of sources from Proust and Wordsworth to Davidson, Strawson and Heidegger, he argues that the significance of place is not to be found in our experience of place so much as in the grounding of experience in place, and that this binding to place is not a contingent feature of human existence, but derives from the very nature of human thought, experience and identity as established in and through place.