The contributors to this volume address global, regional, and local landscapes, cosmopolitan and indigenous cultures, and human and more-than-human ecology as they work to reveal place-specific tensional dynamics. This unusual book, which covers a wide-ranging array of topics, coheres into a work that will be a valuable reference for scholars of geography and the philosophy of place.

This volume presents the concept of Ecoscape as spatial interrelations, or spatially patterned processes, that are constitutive of an environment_an ecosystem. Contributors investigate environmental issues concerning the human impact on geohistory, food distribution, genetically modified biota, waste management, scientific mapping, and the rethinking of human identity.

How do you connect the discipline of anthropology to both philosophy and geography? What about history, sociology, and other applied and theoretical forms of knowledge? In Earth Ways: Framing Geographical Meanings, Gary Backhaus and John Murungi challenge contributors to find the organizing component, or "framings," that enables them to bridge their own work to philosophy and geography. What emerges are truly creative contributions to interdisciplinary thought.

The reflection undertaken here aspires to understand human emotion by joining Aristotle’s and Heidegger’s descriptions of emotion in a thoughtful confrontation(Auseinandersetzung). In his 1924 Aristotle lectures, Heidegger carries out a phenomenology of being-in-the world which illuminates the “structures” of emotion.Aristotle’s descriptions of emotions in the Rhetoric serve to enrich the structures delineated by Heidegger. Although millennia separate the two thinkers and their civilizations, what they say together about emotion is meaningful today. Their philosophical projects may seem to subordinate consideration of (...) emotion to rhetorical or ontological purposes, but they actually serve to enrich our understanding by recognizing the intertwining of speech, world, and emotion. (shrink)

In the psychotherapist-patient relationship, the therapist-fiduciary must deal with ambiguity, assume risks, and make decisions without final appeal to psychiatric theory. Ambiguity regarding patient autonomy poses treatment paradoxes. Caregiving that aims at autonomy can end up undermining it. Additionally, pursuit of autonomy can put the patient’s well-being at risk.

On Dwelling explores the meaning of dwelling in places where we humans live and work—from our homes to the very planet we co-inhabit. Crossing boundaries and disciplines, it lays the groundwork for addressing place-based issues like migration, ethnic division, resource use, and human-caused peril to the earth itself.

The paper offers a reading of “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” and related writings by the famous Japanese haiku poet of the 17 century, Basho. Employing the Heideggerian distinction between earth and world, the interpretation of Basho suggests that prose narrative, represented by Basho’s travelogue or account of his journey by foot through Japan, inserts nature (earth) within the scope of everyday human concerns (world). The reading suggests that it is in the poetic interludes, the haiku pieces that (...) interrupt the story of the trip with pristine word images of a natural object or scene, that nature unfolds on its own terms, i.e. as a world unto itself. (shrink)

The paper uses Heideggerian concepts of world to contrast the lived environment of the animal in the wild to nature as [re]constructed through Geographical Information Systems (GIS). With the animal Umwelt and GIS Weltbilt/Ge-stell side by side, we can see the “contradiction” between the animal’s lived space and the techno-human space of GIS, appreciate the risk of the GIS-constructed world to animals in the wild, and seek a way to address the risk. The paper suggests that humans, as beings which (...) properly have a world, can stand as fiduciaries for nonhuman animals in relation to the peculiar risk of geospatial environmental management technology. (shrink)

Wall Street and Main Street have become opposing icons in narratives of boom and bust that endeavor to account for the financial meltdown in fall 2008 and the Great Recession that followed. In many such narratives, Wall Street denizens are said to have brought on the economic collapse in which ordinary Main Streeters became collateral damage. Economic analysis and political advocacy are carried on in a metaphorics which implicates the fate of Main Street in the rituals of Wall Street. Metaphors (...) can enlighten and mislead, and likely these do both. The present effort aims to go behind the metaphors in order to understand the worlds of Wall Street and Main Street mobilizing the conceptual resources of Schutzian phenomenology. (shrink)