Murdoch University
The Krishna Somers Foundation presents the year’s ninth lecture. The lecture will be given by
Professor Jeff Malpas.
Please come to the lecture, enjoy debating with Professor Malpas and drink some excellent wine (or orange juice).
When: Wednesday November 28 4 PM
Where: Education and Humanities 3.041
Title: Ethos and Topos: Towards a Topographic Ethics
Absract
One of the characteristic features of thinking within the humanities and social sciences over the last ten to fifteen years has been the rise of the concept of place as a central notion across the humanities, social science, and the creative arts. Although, the idea of place has often been associated with the adoption of a broadly ‘phenomenological’ perspective within geography and architecture, it has increasingly been deployed in conjunction with many different theoretical approaches, and with respect to a variety of disciplines. My own work has participated in, and contributed to, this increasing focus on place – along with Ed Casey, in particular, I have tried to develop an account of place as a philosophically significant concept in its own right, and to provide an account of the nature and philosophical underpinnings of the concept. In my work, as well as in Casey’s, place appears as a largely positive notion – although neither Casey nor I has explicitly articulated an ethics or politics of place, it seems clear that the centrality that we give to place carries with it a set of important evaluative commitments. Yet the idea that place is indeed a positive notion, in ethical and political terms, is not at all unproblematic. We need only look to the sites of much contemporary conflict – to sites such as Palestine and Kosovo, and, closer to home, Sydney’s Cronulla Beach – to see how ideas of place, and of belonging to place, can be associated with, and even to foster, an ethics and politics of violence and exclusion. Within the history of twentieth century Europe, it might seem that there is no better or clearer example of this than the Germany of the 1930s and 1940s – the Germany of Hitler, Nazi race politics, and the Holocaust. Examples such as these ought to give pause to those of us who think that place is, indeed, a central and significant concept, and to consider more closely the ethical and political implications of place-oriented thinking. My aim in this essay is to embark on just such a consideration – although the task is one that must continue beyond the confines of this essay alone. The aim is thus to open up the question as to whether an adequate ethics of place – what might be termed, using the language of Place and Experience, a topographic ethics – is possible, and what form it might take. A large part of what is at stake here, of course, concerns the nature of place as such, and our relation to it, such that coming to an understanding of a properly topographic ethics is likely also to have implications for the very deployment of place as a concept in theoretical inquiry and practical engagement.
Jeff Malpas is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tasmania. He is an internationally renowned philosopher with a very strong body of published work. For many years Jeff was a member of Murdoch’s philosophy program.
