This book explores the ways in which the spatio-temporal contingency of human life is being conceived in different fields of research. Specifically, it looks at the relationship between the situatedness of human life, the situation or place in which human life is supposed to be situated, and the dimensions of space and time in which both situation and place are usually themselves supposed to be situated. Over the last two or three decades, the spatio-temporal contingency of human life has become (...) an important topic of research in a broad range of different disciplines including the social sciences, the cultural sciences, the cognitive sciences, and philosophy. However, this research topic is referred to in quite different ways: while some researchers refer to it in terms of “situation”, emphasizing the “situatedness” of human experience and action, others refer to it in terms of “place”, emphasizing the “power of place” and advocating a “topological” or “topographical turn” in the context of a larger “spatial turn”. Interdisciplinary exchange is so far hampered by the fact that the notions referred to and the relationships between them are usually not sufficiently questioned. This book addresses these issues by bringing together contributions on the spatio-temporal contingency of human life from different fields of research. (shrink)

Culture influences what we attend to, encode, remember and think about. Easterners are said to attend more to the relationship between focal objects and their context while Westerners disentangle focal objects from their context. Simply put, Easterners process information holistically and Westerners analytically. Psychosocial factors, like Fear of Isolation, have been proposed as a possible mechanism for cultural differences in terms of information processing. While East vs. West cultural differences are well researched, the monolithic notion that all Westerners process information (...) analytically was questioned in the research presented below. In this paper, we present a study conducted with two Western cultures and one Eastern where we induced the chronic psychosocial factor: Fear of Isolation, and measured its influence on information processing. We found that Italian participants processed information more holistically than us Americans, and that Italians were more similar to Chinese than us Americans. (shrink)

Over the last two or three decades, the spatio-temporal contingency of human life has become an important topic of research in a broad range of different disciplines including the social sciences, the cultural sciences, the cognitive sciences, and philosophy. Significantly, however, this research topic is referred to in quite different ways: While some researchers refer to it in terms of the “situatedness” of human experience and action, others refer to it in terms of “place”, emphasizing the “power of place” and (...) advocating a “topological” or “topographical turn” in the context of a larger “spatial turn”. In this chapter, we will first give a short introduction to place and situatedness as problems in contemporary philosophy and science, in order to roughly sketch the historical context in which the problem has emerged, and indicate some parallels between the different disciplinary fields. In a second step, we will turn to the concepts themselves and provide a preliminary reflection on their basic relation to each other and to other concepts. Finally, we will briefly present the contributions to this volume in the light of the conceptual structure unfolded in the preceding sections and evidence some maybe surprising connections between them. (shrink)

Rund um den Begriff »Ort« hat in der englischsprachigen Philosophie hermeneutischer und phänomenologischer Prägung ein Prozess der Theoriebildung eingesetzt, der in Deutschland bislang nur wenig rezipiert wurde. Der Band ändert dies - er vereint sowohl grundlegende philosophische Beiträge zum Ortsdenken einschlägiger Autor_innen als auch Beiträge, in denen die Ortsproblematik an konkreten Beispielen in Einzelanalysen verdeutlicht wird. Zum Thema wird dabei u.a. die Bedeutung des Ortes in der Literatur, in populären Medien wie Film und Computerspielen, in Kult und Mythos sowie in (...) der Verquickung von Ökonomie und Alltagserfahrung. (shrink)