J.E. Malpas's Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography (Cambridge University Press, 1999) Converging and diverging in/on place

I am delighted to comment on Jeff Malpas’s Place and Experience, clearly the most important recent book on the question of place—likely, the most important book ever on this elusive subject. Malpas himself prefers to call place “opaque” or “obscure”: and if this is so, he is the one who, after so many centuries of neglect and misunderstanding, has cast the most light into its darkest corners. In particular, he has opened a dialogue on place which extends across entire continents and channels of philosophy—and between philosophy and literature and psychology—in deft and decisive ways. For place-o-philes such as myself, he has opened an entire realm of discourse about this difŽ cult topic.