Edward Casey Boeken

Enlarged edition of a classic work on the significance of place

Offers a philosophical history of the evolving conceptualizations of place and space in Western thought. In this title, the author begins with mythological and religious creation stories and the theories of Plato and Aristotle and then explores the heritage of Neoplatonic, medieval, and Renaissance speculations about space.

What happens when we glance around a room? How do we trust what we see in fleeting moments? Glancing counts for more of human perception than previously imagined. An entire universe is perceived in a glance, but our quick and uncommitted attention prevents examination of these rapid acts and processes.

Edward Casey, an Irish Cockney from Canning Town, was no war hero. Yet his account of four years of war service with the Royal Dublin Fusiliers provides an interesting chronicle of personal insecurities, Irish unrest and military tourism.

You are here, a map declares, but of course you are not, any more than you truly occupy the vantage point into which a landscape painting puts you. How maps and paintings figure and reconfigure space—as well as our place in it—is the subject of Edward S. Casey’s ambitious study, an exploration of how we portray the world and its many places.  Casey’s discussion ranges widely from Northern Sung landscape painting to nineteenth-century American and British landscape painting and photography, from prehistoric petroglyphs and medieval portolan charts to seventeenth-century Dutch cartography and land survey maps of the American frontier. From these culturally and historically diverse forays a theory of representation emerges. Casey proposes that the representation of place in visual works be judged in terms not of resemblance, but of reconnecting with an earth and world that are not the mere content of mind or language—a reconnection that calls for the embodiment and implacement of the human subject.   Representing Place is the third volume in Casey’s influential epic project of reinterpreting evolving conceptions of space in world thought. He combines history with philosophy, and cartography with art, to create a new understanding of how representation requires and thrives on space, ultimately renewing our appreciation of the power of place as it is set forth in paintings and maps. 

Plants in Place is a collaborative study of vegetal phenomenology at the intersection of Edward S. Casey’s phenomenology of place and Michael Marder’s plant-thinking.