Subject: Re: Section 3-4, BT
Date: Thu, 8 Aug 2002 09:10:27 -0400


Malcolm,

Thanks for your reply. I certainly can't claim that I endorse the cognitive
psychology approach, just that what you said reminded me of it.

For me, the interest is not whether we have an often unthought-about
understanding of the world, which includes a spatial knowledge (given, for
example that we don't look at a map on our journey to work every day), but
how useful it is to describe this understanding as non-theoretical. I think
it's better not to go too far in saying that theory and practice are
separate, they are complementary as you say. Foucault had this view too. Our
practices are constituted as objects of knowledge. Perhaps it's a matter of
emphasis or the word "theoretical" blocking my thinking here.

> Got any anecdotes you might like to share?

Peter Gould was a geography professor at Penn State, where he often studied
with Joseph Kockelmans [and I meant was influenced by Medard Boss before,
not Binswanger]. When he got his degree in the early 60s geography was
dominated by a quantitative approach which I would say he critically
embraced (it's often forgotten that he continued teaching spatial analysis
even during his Heideggerian period). But he was quite sceptical of it as a
be-all and end-all and would often quote poetry by Paul Valéry in his
classes! He never wrote explicitly about Heidegger, preferring, as Stuart
Elden quotes from Foucault, to have him as one of "a small number of authors
with whom one thinks, with whom one works, but about whom one does not
write".

An excellent short piece that gives a flavor is "Thinking like a geographer"
that he published in The Canadian Geographer, 35(1), 1991.

--Jeremy



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