Understanding Place BT - Place, Space and Hermeneutics

Abstract

Phenomenological interest in place has been focused most intensely on the claim that human experience is essentially bound to place. The phenomenological approach typically pursues the analysis of the essential or universal structures of our experience as worldly or bodily situated subjects. Place, however, trades in and relies on the particularity and contingency of the life world. This raises the question as to how the orientation toward the universal affects place, and how this relates to an alternative approach that takes place as its point of departure. As an attempt to answer this question I shall introduce an exterophenomenological approach toward understanding place as the grounding structure of experience. The result will be to show how place itself can be used as a methodological framework of understanding, thus as a hermeneutical tool.