Heidegger´s topology

This is a groundbreaking argument that the concept of place is central to Heidegger´s thinking - and at the heart of all philosophical inquiry. This groundbreaking inquiry into the centrality of place in Martin Heidegger´s thinking offers not only an illuminating reading of Heidegger´s thought but also 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.(Malpas also challenges the widely repeated arguments that link Heidegger´s notions of place and belonging to his entanglement with Nazism.) 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.
Acknowledgments ix
1. Introduction: Heidegger, Place, and Topology

2. Beginning in Place

3. The Ontology of Existence Meaning and Temporality

4. The Turning of Thought Truth and World

5. The Poetry That Thinks Place and “Event”