Dwelling, Place and Environment: Towards a Phenomenology of Person and World

themes among the essays resurface and resonate. Though our request for essays was broad and open-ended, we found that topics such as seeing, authenticity, interpretation, wholeness, care, and dwelling ran as undercur­ rents throughout. Our major hope is that each essay plays a part in revealing a larger whole of meaning which says much about a more humane relation­ ship with places, environments and the earth as our home. Part I. Beginnings and directions At the start, we recognize the tremendous debt this volume owes to philosopher Martin Heidegger (1890-1976), whose ontological excavations into the nature of human existence and meaning provide the philosophical foundations for many of the essays, particularly those in Part I of the volume. Above all else, Heidegger was regarded by his students and colleagues as a master teacher. He not only thought deeply but was also able to show others how to think and to question. Since he, perhaps more than anyone else in this century, provides the instruction for dOing a phenomenology and hermeneutic of humanity's existential situation, he is seminal for phenomenological and hermeneutical research in the environmental disci­ plines. He presents in his writings what conventional scholarly work, especially the scientific approach, lacks; he helps us to evoke and under­ stand things through a method that allows them to come forth as they are; he provides a new way to speak about and care for our human nature and environment.

Table of Contents:
1. Dwelling, place and environment: An introduction.- I. Beginnings and directions.- 2. Geographical experiences and being-in-the-world: The phenomenological origins of geography.- 3. The quest for authenticity and the replication of environmental meaning.- 4. Language and the emergence of the environment.- 5. Place, body and situation.- II. Environment and place.- 6. Acoustic space.- 7. Bound to the environment: Towards a phenomenology of sightlessness.- 8. Towards revealing the sense of place: An intuitive “reading” of four Dalmatian towns.- 9. The circle and the cross: Loric and sacred space in the holy wells of Ireland.- 10. Many dwellings: Views of a Pueblo world.- 11. A phenomenological approach to architecture and its teaching in the design studio.- III. Place and dwelling.- 12. The dwelling door: Towards a phenomenology of transition.- 13. Body, house and city: The intertwinings of embodiment, inhabitation and civilization.- 14. Reconciling old and new worlds: The dwelling-journey relationship as portrayed in Vilhelm Moberg’s “Emigrant” novels.- 15. The role of spiritual discipline in learning to dwell on earth.- IV. Discovering wholes.- 16. Nature, water symbols and the human quest for wholeness.- 17. Counterfeit and authentic wholes: Finding a means for dwelling in nature.- The contributors.