This article offers a thorough and critical reading of Husserl’s Thing and Space. This reading is principally motivated by the effort to methodologically design a phenomenological–topological approach to the research of lived sonic environments. In this book, Husserl lays foundations of phenomenological topology by understanding perceptions as places and defining, consequently, the space as a system of places. The critical reading starts with pointing out the ambiguity of location in Thing and Space, which consists mainly in the insufficient implementation of (...) the distinction between the location and the localization. Further investigations then reveal the roots of this ambiguity in both the preference of visual perception and the omission of subjective aspects of kinesthesia. The article critically examines Husserl’s notion of the appended localization that expresses the marginalization of acoustic experience. In conclusion, the article utilizes the critical findings to formulate the project of a place-based, medium-centered, and multi-sensory approach to sonic environments. (shrink)

The publication of the revised edition of Jeff Malpas’s Place and Experience in 2018 gives the opportunity to reconsider this book and the debates that it originally...

The thesis evaluates a contemporary debate concerning the very possibility of thinking about the world. In the first chapter, McDowell's critique of Davidson is presented, focusing on the coherentism defended by the latter. The critique of the myth of the given (as it appears in Sellars and Wittgenstein), as well as the necessity of a minimal empiricism (which McDowell finds in Quine and Kant), lead to an oscillation in contemporary thinking between two equally unsatisfactory ways of understanding the empirical content (...) of thought. In the second chapter, I defend Davidson's approach, focusing on his theory of interpretation and semantic externalism, as well as on the relation between causes and reasons. In the third chapter, the debate is analyzed in more detail. I criticize the anomalous monism, the way in which the boundaries between the conceptual and the non-conceptual are understood by Davidson, as well as the naturalized Platonism defended by McDowell. This thesis is mainly negative, and it concludes by revealing problems in both positions under evaluation. (shrink)