Book excerpt: While the "sense of place" is a familiar theme in poetry and art, philosophers have generally given little or no attention to place and the human relation to place. Jeff Malpas seeks to remedy this by advancing an account of the nature and significance of place as a complex but unitary structure that encompasses self and other, space and time, subjectivity and objectivity. He argues that our relation to place derives from the very nature of human thought, experience and identity as established in and through place.