Jeff Malpas

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.

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.

To what extent is our being as social creatures dependent on our having a grasp of sociality? Is a purely solipsistic space, a space that can be grasped without any grasp of the existence of others, possible? These questions are examined and the possible connection between space and sociality explored. The central claim is that there is indeed an intimate relation between the concept of space and the idea of the social: that any creature that has a grasp of the concept of space must also be a creature that has a grasp of sociality in the sense of having a grasp of itself as one creature existing alongside a multiplicity of other creatures.

This chapter attempts to examine nostalgia as both a mood or disposition in general, and as a mood or disposition that is characteristic of philosophical reflection. Nostalgia is a combination of the Greek nostos, meaning home or the return home, with algos, meaning pain, so that its literal meaning is a pain associated with the return home. Part of this inquiry will involve a rethinking of the mood of nostalgia and what that mood encompasses. Rather than understand the nostalgic as characterized solely by the desire to return to a halcyon past, it is explored through the connotations suggested by its Greek etymology as precisely a longing for the return home—a return that cannot be achieved—a form of homesickness, and so as unsettling rather than comfortable, as bringing with it a sense of the essential questionability of our own being in the world.

O lugar comum, no que tange à imagem de Heidegger, é a de um filósofo firmemente enraizado, não na cidade de Freiburg, na qual passou grande parte de sua vida, mas na região rural alemânico-suábia, nos arredores do povoado de Messkirch, onde nasceu. Poderia parecer que a distância entre Heidegger e Benjamin, entre Messkirch e Berlim, ou Paris, não poderia ser maior. Mas até que ponto estão as predileções pessoais de Heidegger pelo provinciano e o bauerlich de fato ligadas às posições filosóficas que ele desenvolveu? Poderia ser este o caso, de que a cidade, talvez ainda mais do que o campo, devesse desempenhar um papel central em qualquer tentativa séria de se pensar até o fim as implicações do pensamento de Heidegger sobre o ser? Esta apresentação investigará como Heidegger se sentiria na cidade de Benjamin, bem como o lugar da cidade no pensamento do próprio Heidegger, com o propósito de lançar luz não apenas sobre o pensamento de Heidegger, mas também sobre o do próprio Benjamin.The commonplace image of Heidegger is of a philosopher firmly rooted, not in the city of Freiburg in which much of his life was spent, but in the Alemannic-Schwabian countryside around the village of Messkirch in which he was born. It would seem that the distance between Heidegger and Benjamin, between Messkirch and Berlin or Paris could not be greater. But to what extent are Heidegger's own personal predilections for the provincial and the bauerlich actually tied to the philosophical positions that he developed? Might it be the case that the city, perhaps even more than the countryside, has to play a central role in any serious attempt to think through the implications of Heidegger's thought of being? This presentation will explore how Heidegger might find himself in Benjamin's city, and of the place of the city in Heidegger's own thought, with the aim of shedding light, not only on Heidegger's thought, but also on that of Benjamin himself

One of the most influential and significant developments in the philosophy of language over the last thirty years has been the rise of externalist conceptions of content. This essay aims to explore the implications of a form of externalism, largely derived from the work of Donald Davidson, for thinking about history, and in so doing to suggest one way in which contemporary philosophy of language may engage with contemporary philosophy of history. Much of the discussion focuses on the elaboration of the externalism that is at issue, along with the holistic approach to content with which it is connected. It will be argued that such holistic externalism is itself thoroughly in keeping with the very character of historical inquiry itself, and can be seen to provide an underpinning to certain contemporary developments in historical thinking

This paper advances an account of truth that has as its starting point Aristotle’s comments about truth at Metaphysics 1011b1. It argues that there are two key ideas in the Aristotelian account: that truth belongs to ‘sayings that’; and that truth involves both what is said and what is. Beginning with the second of these apparent truisms, the paper argues for the crucial role of the distinction between ‘what is said’ and ‘what is’ in the understanding of truth, on the grounds that it is essential to the distinction between truth and falsity and, indeed, to the very possibility of any critical assessment of statements. However, this distinction cannot be used to ground any account of truth in terms that refer to anything other than truth—there is thus no relation that underlies truth even though truth may be construed (in a certain limited sense) relationally. Returning to the first point, it is argued that while truth should indeed be understood as belonging to statements, it should not be construed as attaching to ‘propositions’, but to uttered sentences. The account of truth advanced is minimalist, and yet not deflationist; objectivist, and yet not independent of actual linguistic practice.

Water, its presence or absence, and the forms in which it appears, is fundamental to any and every place on earth. Indeed, along with soil, air and light, water is elemental to place, and so also to all life and dwelling in place. Moreover, human life is itself essentially determined through its entanglement in place and places, and so is constituted, if indirectly, perhaps, through water and its forms. The centrality of place that I am alluding to here arises out of a conception of the relation between human being and place, according to which who and what we are is fundamentally determined by the places in which we live – and this is so even while places are also shaped by the lives that are formed within them.

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..

Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, constitutes one of the earliest reflections on the way in which the cultural experience and interpretation is transformed by the advent of what were then the ‘new’ media technologies of photography and film. Benjamin directs attention to the way in which these technologies release cultural objects from their unique presence in a place and make them uniformly available irrespective of spatial location. The way in which old media technologies apparently obliterate the place of cultural objects is also a feature of new media. However, the apparent obliteration of place that occurs in this way is itself problematic, in giving rise to a loss of the sense of spatial and temporal distance, and so of the relative locatedness of both experiencing subject and interpreted object. The loss of a sense of the place of the object threatens a loss of the sense of place of the subject, and with it, a loss of a proper sense of heritage as such.