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…
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…
I am also asking the reader to suppose that the concept of space has nothing to do with perception. Geometrical space is a pure abstraction. Outer space can be visualized but cannot be seen. The cues for depth refer only to paintings, nothing more. The visual third dimension is a misapplication of Descartes’s notion of three axes for a coordinate…
The traditional and well-established meaning of a concept crystallized into a specific word should be the starting point for any investigation that aims at questioning that concept. In this article, I will list all of the different entries and the different senses that the noun place and the noun space have according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Right after the…