The Phenomenology of Place

Abstract

This chapter provides a brief exegesis of understanding of place in Heidegger’s philosophy from the equipmental spatiality of Being and Time, the danger of modern technology and technicity to understanding place through the role of “the thing” as a gathering entity through its “thinging.” The purpose of this is to support the contention that the use of things in the world is critical to the understanding of place in contrast to the “industrial” or modernist notion. This account moves across the philosophical thinking of Heidegger, and in doing so acknowledges the change (more famously “the Turn”) in Heidegger’s thought regarding place while retaining elements of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology in Being and Time in an overall account of how people understand place through the usage of things in the world.