Suraj Chaudhary’s essay for the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, published online in advance of the paper edition.
Suraj Chaudhary – ‘The Ambiguity of Nearness in Heidegger’s Ort and Merleau-Ponty’s Espace Vécu’: JBSP (Originally published online: 22 March 2020).
Abstract: Phenomenological approaches to space have consistently made a distinction between a plurality of inhabited spaces and the single homogenous extendedness of Euclidean space. Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty postulate unique spatial wholes pertaining to human life that pose a counterpoint to objective space and provide the necessary context for understanding all our spatial relations. However, the spatial wholes that are posited to clarify these relations are themselves far from univocal. Specifically, differences exist regarding what precisely unites various entities into a meaningful spatial whole and how any such whole relates to others. Showing how Heidegger’s idea of Ort and Merleau-Ponty’s notion of espace vécu rely on multiple senses of nearness, this paper argues that the privileged sense of nearness in each case fails to delimit the spatial context, thereby putting into question the very possibility of a unified and distinct spatial whole.
Full article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00071773.2020.1743954
Suraj Chaudhary, Department of Philosophy, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA
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