With the present work, I begin the first of two articles that approach the questions of space and place from a scientific perspective, through the presentation of historically grounded texts by three physicists. The first is The Discovery of Dynamics: A Study from a Machian Point of View of the Discovery and the Structure of Dynamical Theories (2001), by the…
I consider Edward Casey’s book The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History my raison d’être in the critical debate on the meaning of the concepts of place and space. With this article I want to pay tribute to this fundamental work, which, for me, was complementary to a couple of other texts, more focused on the scientific perspective concerning the…
What does the Portuguese football star Cristiano Ronaldo (CR7) have to do with concepts of place and space? A lot: I believe that examining CR7’s gestures on a football pitch can provide valuable insights into the seamless continuity between ‘body’, ‘place’, and ‘existence’. I mean actual, concrete, bodily existence in a specific place, or even better, existence as being-in-place, which…
I briefly come back to the renewed sense of place I’ve spoken about in the previous article – What Is Place? What Is Space? – where I’ve said that ‘place is any real entity emerging from inorganic, organic, social and symbolic – or intellectual – processes’ (definition I-R. a); more extendedly – and including a basic definition of reality on…
This article is especially focused on the etymology and semantics of the words space, and place; it is the prosecution of the previous article – What Is Place? What Is Space? – so that everybody can have a first, basic, idea of the linguistic histories of those two words and the associated meanings. There are a few points I would like to…