20 Place, Philosophy, and Non-Philosophy Bruce Janz Janz is Professor of Humanities in the Philosophy Department at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. He is also graduate faculty with the Texts and Technologies PhD program, and director of the Center for Human- ities and Digital Research. He has written Philosophy in an African Place (Lexington Books, 2009). Bruce.janz@ucf.edu © 2014 Bruce Janz. y partner Lisa is fond of saying that we go into our academic areas based on what confuses and bewilders us. She means this somewhat facetiously when she thinks about her own area, creative writing, and adjacent areas such as rhetoric and literature. She sus- pects her area draws people who are baffled by basic human communication and coherent narrative. She’s probably right. I can say that I was drawn to studying place in part because it baffled me. I grew up on the Canadian prairies, and Saskatchewan is full of writers and artists who feel the need to explain the mystical draw of wide spaces to detractors in the rest of Canada. There is a strong attachment to place where I come from, but while I love where I’m from, I didn’t quite understand why that attachment existed. It’s not that I couldn’t see the beauty or under- stand the subtle colors and sounds. I still remember the smell of the wheat harvest in August and the crisp- ness of hoarfrost in the brilliant winter sun. W. O. Mitchell’s Who Has Seen The Wind? was read by every school child, and it both evoked a feature of the prairies we supposed that only we could understand, and also the invisibility of that feature. We felt like we had a secret, privileged knowledge of that place. And yet, when it came time to go off to university in Ontario, I didn’t look back. It didn’t get into my bones the way I saw that it did for others. It was the new place that I wanted. Was I “differently-abled,” lacking a place-sense that others possessed, and so much the poorer for it? Maybe. I went into philoso- phy, after all, notoriously the discipline least con- cerned about place, at least classically. Didn’t philos- ophers rise as quickly as possible to the level of the universal, and leave all those messy particulars for other disciplines? When philosophers did think about place, it was much like how Hegel thought about “individual”—as a universal concept that attached itself to all particular things. Place was like that—everything had one, and therefore the philosophical task was to consider this shared feature of all particularities. I suppose my attrac- tion to philosophy should not have been a surprise—in high school science, I also gravitated toward physics and away from biology, on the grounds that physics seemed simpler to me—just equations and laws. Bio- logical entities were messy—every one of them had a new set of facts to know. Every one of them was partic- ular. Just like places. e know a lot about the philosophy of place but little about the place of philosophy or, ra- ther, the places of philosophy. We tend to think that philosophy has no place, that the development of its concepts is historical accident, which is not, of course, susceptible to logical analysis and therefore of little philosophical interest. This perspective is evident even in policies from the American Philosophical Association concerning ethics. There are numerous statements on aspects of phi- losophy as a profession but few on the ethics of philos- ophy itself. If we compare the APA statements to other national academic organizations, such as the American Anthropological Association, we find that those groups reflect on the ethics of the methods and practices of an- thropologists qua anthropologists, rather than anthro- pologists qua professionals or university members. The distinction is important, as it points to an inter- esting gap within philosophy. Despite supposedly “owning” the sub-discipline of ethics, it is a study to be applied largely outside of philosophy itself, rather than inside. Why? Because ethics is about how we act toward M W Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology. 1990-2014: Special 25th Anniversary Edition. 25:3 Editor: David Seamon