Thomas Hünefeldt

Introduction: Situatedness and Place

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 (1), 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 (2). 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 (3).