Jeff Malpas

Numinous Fields has its roots in a phenomenological understanding of perception. It seeks to understand what, beyond the mere sensory data they provide, landscape, nature, and art, both separately and jointly, may mean when we experience them. It focuses on actual or potential experiences of the numinous, or sacred, that such encounters may give rise to. This volume is multi-disciplinary in scope. It examines perceptions of place, space, nature, and art as well as perceptions of place, space, and nature in art. It includes chapters written by art curators, and historians and scholars in the fields of landscape, architecture, cultural geography, religious studies, philosophy, and art. Its chapters examine ideas, objects, and practices from the ancient time of Aboriginal Australians' Dreaming through to the present. The volume is also multi-cultural in scope and includes chapters focussed on manifestations of the sacred in indigenous culture, in cultures influenced by each of the world's major religions, and in the secular, contemporary world. Contributors: Samer Akkach, James Bennett, Veronica della Dora, Alasdair Forbes, Virginia Hooker, Philip Jones, Russell Kelty, Muchammadun,Tracey Lock, Ellen Philpott-Teo, John Powell, Rebekah Pryor, Wendy Shaw.

In Mills’ sociological analysis, a central notion is the ‘social milieu’ which encapsulates ‘the social setting of a person that is directly open to his personal experience’. For Mills, sociology should entail an investigation of the set of relations and practices that are a feature of human experience. Understanding the significance of Mills’ approach, we argue, requires grasping the way the notion of ‘milieu’ or ‘setting’ itself draws upon spatial and topological notions – notions that have become prominent in much contemporary sociological thinking. From this perspective, Mills’ work turns out to be relevant as a corrective, both to the undue emphasis on empirical particularity that is evident in some contemporary sociology and to what Mills viewed as ‘abstract’ theorisation. A large part of the relevance of Mills’ work for contemporary sociological problems and challenges is thus to be found in the way his emphasis on situation (or ‘place’), as given through the idea of ‘milieu’, allows a more complex and encompassing approach.

Hermeneutics is a major theoretical and practical form of intellectual enquiry, central not only to philosophy but many other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. With phenomenology and existentialism, it is also one of the twentieth century’s most important philosophical movements and includes major thinkers such as Heidegger, Gadamer and Ricoeur. The Routledge Companion to Hermeneutics is an outstanding guide and reference source to the key philosophers, topics and themes in this exciting subject and is the first volume of its kind. Comprising over fifty chapters by a team of international contributors the Companion is divided into five parts: main figures in the hermeneutical tradition movement, including Heidegger, Gadamer and Ricoeur main topics in hermeneutics such as language, truth, relativism and history the engagement of hermeneutics with central disciplines such as literature, religion, race and gender, and art hermeneutics and world philosophies including Asian, Islamic and Judaic thought hermeneutic challenges and debates, such as critical theory, structuralism and phenomenology

A growing literature testifies to the persistence of place as an incorrigible aspect of human experience, identity, and morality. Place is a common ground for thought and action, a community of experienced particulars that avoids solipsism and universalism. It draws us into the philosophy of the ordinary, into familiarity as a form of knowledge, into the wisdom of proximity. Each of these essays offers a philosophy of place, and reminds us that such philosophies ultimately decide how we make, use, and understand places, whether as accidents, instruments, or fields of care

New Books on Philosophy of Religion Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim that God Speaks By Nicholas Wolterstorff, Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. 326. ISBN 0–521–47557–0. $18.95. The Historical Christ and the Jesus of Faith: The Incamational Narrative as History By C. Stephen Evans, Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. 386. ISBN 0–19–826397‐X $17.95. Consciousness and the Mind of God By Charles Taliaferro, Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. 349. ISBN 0–521–46173–1. $65.00. Wittgenstein and Quine By Robert L. Arrington and Hans‐Johann Glock Routledge, 1996. Pp. xvii + 286. ISBN 0–415–09676–6. £40.00. Language and Reason: A Study of Habermas's Pragmatics By Maeve Cooke, MIT Press, 1997. Pp. 232. ISBN 0–262–53145–3. £12.00. Form and Good in Plato's Eleatic Dialogues By Kenneth Dorter, University of California Press, 1994. Pp. x + 156. ISBN 0–520–08331–8. $45.00 Plotin über Sein, Zahl und Einheit By Christoph Horn, B. G. Teubner, 1995. Pp. 368. ISBN 3–519–07611‐X. The Metaphysics of Theism: Aquinas's Natural Theology in Summa Contra Gentiles I By Norman Kretzmann, Clarendon Press, 199. Pp. 000. 0–19–823660–3. Price £35.00. Reason, Truth and Self: The Postmodern Reconditioned By Michael Luntley, Routledge, 1995. Pp. xv + 248, ISBN 0–415–11853–0. £11.99 Approaches to Intentionality By William Lyons, Clarendon Press, 1995. Pp. 261. ISBN 0–19–823526–7. £30.00 Benacerraf and his Critics Edited by Adam Morton and Stephen P. Stich, Blackwell, 1996. Pp. xi + 271. ISBN 0–631–19268–9. £45.00. Atheism and Theism By Jack J. C. Smart and John J. Haldane, Blackwell Publishers, 1996. Pp. 234. ISBN 0–631–19291–3. £40.00. ISBN 0–631–19292–1. £12.99. Human Lives: Critical Essays on Consequentialist Bioethics Edited by David S. Oderberg and Jacqueline A. Laing Macmillan Press, 1997. Pp. viii + 244. ISBN 0–333–62980–0. £40 Freedom within Reason By Susan Wolf, Oxford University Press, 1993. Pp. 162. ISBN 0–19–508565–5. £13.99. An Introduction to Political Philosophy By Jonathan Wolff, Opus, Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. 230 + index. ISBN 19–289251–7 £8.99

Governments have used several mechanisms to deal with intractable policy conflicts about issues in bioethics. One mechanism is the installment of an ethics committee and another one is the organization of public debates. Often, ethics committees have an implicit or explicit role in the stimulation of such public debate. However, this role is not self-evident and we therefore analyse the relation between committees and public debate. What should the function of biotechnology ethics committees be, how does this relate to their composition, and to what extent are these functions met in practice? To this end, we have examined the three national committees of the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Australia in the field of animal and plant biotechnology. We argue that there is often a mismatchbetween the goals one wants to reach by stimulating public debate and the way this has been given shape, partly through ethics committees. In fact, installing (biotechnology) ethics committees is to a certain extent a premature move that contains rather than stimulates public debate.

Heidegger scholars consider the philosopher's recently published notebooks, including the issues of Heidegger's Nazism and anti-Semitism. For more than forty years, the philosopher Martin Heidegger logged ideas and opinions in a series of notebooks, known as the “Black Notebooks” after the black oilcloth booklets into which he first transcribed his thoughts. In 2014, the notebooks from 1931 to 1941 were published, sparking immediate controversy. It has long been acknowledged that Heidegger was an enthusiastic supporter of the Nazi Party in the early 1930s. But the notebooks contain a number of anti-Semitic passages—often referring to the stereotype of “World-Jewry”—written even after Heidegger became disenchanted with the Nazis themselves. Reactions from the scholarly community have ranged from dismissal of the significance of these passages to claims that the anti-Semitism in them contaminates all of Heidegger's work. This volume offers the first collection of responses by Heidegger scholars to the publication of the notebooks. In essays commissioned especially for the book, the contributors offer a wide range of views, addressing not only the issues of anti-Semitism and Nazism but also the broader questions that the notebooks raise. Contributors Babette Babich, Andrew Bowie, Steven Crowell, Fred Dallmayr, Donatella Di Cesare, Michael Fagenblat, Ingo Farin, Gregory Fried, Jean Grondin, Karsten Harries, Laurence Paul Hemming, Jeff Malpas, Thomas Rohkrämer, Tracy B. Strong, Peter Trawny, Daniela Vallega-Neu, Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Nancy A. Weston, Holger Zaborowski.

The thirteen essays in this volume represent the most sustained investigation, in any language, of the connections between Heidegger's thought and the tradition of transcendental philosophy inaugurated by Kant. This collection examines Heidegger's stand on central themes of transcendental philosophy: subjectivity, judgment, intentionality, truth, practice, and idealism. Several essays in the volume also explore hitherto hidden connections between Heidegger's later "post-metaphysical" thinking—where he develops a "topological" approach that draws as much upon poetry as upon the philosophical tradition—and the transcendental project of grasping the conditions that make experience of a meaningful world possible. This volume will interest philosophers in the continental tradition, where Heidegger's thought has long had a central role, as well as those many philosophers in the analytic tradition whose own approach to knowledge, semantics, and philosophy of mind traces its roots to Kant.

This essay is a meditation on the relevance of the concept of Zeitgeist for thinking about the ills of our contemporary globalized world. Exploring the heritage of the term from Roman times through to Herder, Hegel, and others, Malpas argues that Zeitgeist (literally: spirit of the time) nevertheless includes a notion of place such that time always unfolds in and through place. It is Heidegger who, for Malpas, most illuminatingly thinks this belonging-together of place and time. Malpas explores the disorientation and anxiety created by the spatialization of the modern world, which imagines that horizons of time and place can be dissolved into unbounded, undifferentiated space.

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.

One of Max Charlesworth’s most important contributions has been to the development of contemporary bioethical thinking. In Bioethics in a Liberal Society, Charlesworth explores the consequences of the liberal commitment to the core value of autonomy across a range of areas beginning with the end of life. Focusing on just this latter issue, this contribution explores the question whether the principle of autonomy is indeed adequate to be the primary principle on the basis of which to address the issues surrounding the end of life. Part of the underlying concern here is thus with the nature of our dying in a ‘liberal society’ of the sort Charlesworth describes.

Diego Bubbio, Ingo Farin and Glenda Satne have advanced a range of comments, questions and challenges relating to the ideas and arguments set out in the new edition of my Place and Experience (2018). Rather than address each of my interlocutors separately, my responses here are organized around four main topics: the relation between space and place, including the nature of space; the relation between place and subjectivity, and the foundational role of place; the relation between place and conceptuality; and the relation between place and normativity.