User:Allstrom/sandbox/J. E. Malpas

Jeffery Edward Malpas
Born	(1958-08-21) 21 August 1958 Campsie, New South Wales, Australia
Education	Australian National University, Ph.D.
Era	Contemporary philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Continental philosophy Phenomenology Hermeneutics
Main interests	Place and Space Ethics Philosophy of language Modernity
Notable ideas	Philosophical Topography: grounding of human thought, experience, and identity in place.
Website	jeffmalpas.com//

Jeff Malpas, FAHA, is an Australian philosopher and Emeritus Distinguished Professor at the University of Tasmania in Hobart. Known internationally for his work across the analytic and continental traditions, Malpas is also at the forefront of contemporary philosophical research on the concept of "place" (topos), as first and most comprehensively presented in his Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography—now in its second edition—and further developed in numerous subsequent works (see "Selected Publications").

Education

BA, History and Philosophy (1980); MA, Philosophy (1982, with First Class Honours) from the University of Auckland (NZ); and PhD (1986) from the Australian National University (thesis: "Agreement and Interpretation").

Career

Malpas joined the University of Tasmania in 1999 and, there, was actively engaged for twenty years. During that time, he held both academic and administrative positions, including Professor and Chair of Philosophy, Australian Research Council (ARC) Professorial Fellow, and Director of University Collections. He founded the University of Tasmania Centre for Applied Philosophy and Ethics (later the Inglis Centre), and served as its director for five years. In 2011, Malpas was recognised as Distinguished Professor and continued with a university-wide appointment that spanned a broad range of disciplines, including architecture, geography, and environmental studies, and involved collaborative research projects in those as well as other disciplines, such as archaeology, design, the creative arts, history, sociology, anthropology, and medical humanities. His supervision of sixty doctoral students reflects similarly diverse disciplines and topics. Upon retirement, in 2018, he was made Emeritus Distinguished Professor. Prior to his work at the University of Tasmania, Malpas held a Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Fellowship at Heidelberg University and was founder and head of the philosophy programme at Murdoch University (Western Australia). He also held positions at the University of New England (Australia) and the University of Auckland, and has been a visiting scholar at universities in the United States, Germany, England, and Sweden. He continues to hold positions as Visiting Distinguished Professor at La Trobe University in Melbourne and Honorary Professor at the University of Queensland. Current endeavours primarily focus on select research, publication, and consultancy activities, as well as commenting on issues of contemporary ethics and politics.

Thinking and Writing

Malpas's philosophical work is situated amidst five major themes: (1) German Post-Kantian philosophy (especially Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer), (2) twentieth-century American philosophy (especially Donald Davidson and Richard Rorty), (3) hermeneutics and philosophy of language, (4) philosophy of place and space (including philosophy of art and philosophy of architecture, among others), and (5) the critique of modernity (including the critique of contemporary bureaucracy and management).

In its connections to both the analytic and continental traditions, Malpas’s work can be seen as also providing a connection between them. His readings of Heidegger and Gadamer are characterised by an emphasis on argumentative reconstruction and clarity of exposition, while his interpretation and development of Davidson’s thought emphasises the broader philosophical and meta-philosophical elements of the Davidsonian position (and, so, places greater emphasis on Davidson’s later writings as providing the framework for reading Davidson’s work as a whole).

Malpas has devoted considerable attention to the idea of the transcendental, particularly as it links with hermeneutic themes, and places special emphasis on notions of ground and limit. He sees the transcendental as providing an important point of connection between philosophers such as Davidson, Gadamer, and Heidegger, even as it also connects to Malpas’s own development of what he has termed “philosophical topography.”

The latter idea not only draws on phenomenological and hermeneutic resources but also is heavily indebted to analytic approaches in philosophy of mind and of language. Distinguishing his work, in this realm, is the detailed conceptual analysis of topographical and spatial notions, the methodological implications that it associates with the focus on place, and the topographical analysis of self and identity. As developed in his Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography, Malpas sees place as “a complex but unitary structure that encompasses self and other, space and time, subjectivity and objectivity.” He argues for an “externalist” conception of self and mind, according to which human lives are indissolubly linked to the places in which those lives are lived. Indeed, he posits that the importance of place lies, not so much in the experience that one might have of place (or a particular place), but in the fact that it is place that makes all experience, thought, and identity possible—that place is that in and through which all things are grounded and all things happen.

Two subsequent volumes—Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World (2006) and Heidegger and the Thinking of Place: Explorations in the Topology of Being (2012)—provide more specific analyses of notions of place and “topology” found in the work of Martin Heidegger (who, himself, refers to his thinking as a “topology of Being”). And, even more specifically, Malpas examines a central aspect of Heidegger’s topological thinking—particularly as it relates to architecture and other spatial disciplines—in his Rethinking Dwelling: Heidegger, Place, Architecture (2021).

Awards and Recognition

In November 2018 Malpas was elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Selected Publications

• The Fundamental Field (with Kenneth White). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. May 2021. ISBN: 9781474485272.
• Consequences of Hermeneutics: Fifty Years after Truth and Method, co-edited with Santiago Zabala (Northwestern University Press, 2010).
• Heidegger's Topology: Being, Place, World. MIT Press. 2007. ISBN 9780262250337.
• Kalay, Yehuda; Kvan, Thomas; Affleck, Janice (2007-11-14). New Heritage: New Media and Cultural Heritage. ISBN 9780203937884.
• Perspectives on Human Dignity: A Conversation, co-edited with Norelle Lickiss (Springer, 2007).
• Transcendental Heidegger, co-edited with Steven Galt Crowell (Stanford University Press, 2007).
• Malpas, J; Solomon, Robert C (2002-06-01). Death and Philosophy. ISBN 9780203195154.
• Gadamer, Hans Georg; Malpas, Jeff E; Arnswald, Ulrich; Kertscher, Jens (January 2002). Gadamer's Century: Essays in Honor of Hans-Georg Gadamer. ISBN 9780262632478.
• Wrathall, Mark A; Malpas, Jeff E (2000). Heidegger, Coping, and Cognitive Science. ISBN 9780262731287.
• Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography. Cambridge University Press. 1999. ISBN 9781139426114.
• Journal of the Philosophy of History (Brill, 1963, released quarterly)

External Links

• University of Tasmania
• MIT Press
• Interview with 3:AM Magazine
• Jeff Mapas with Hannah Billenstein and Pietro Nickl: Is Philosophy a science? /Festival der Philosophie 2021