Jeff Malpas

Malpas has devoted considerable attention to the idea of the transcendental, particularly as it connects with hermeneutic themes, with special emphasis on notions of ground and limit. He sees the transcendental as providing an important point of connection between philosophers such as Donald Davidson, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Martin Heidegger, while the focus on the transcendental also connects with Malpas’s methodological development of the idea of philosophical topography.

Inasmuch as it draws heavily on both the analytic and continental traditions, so Malpas’s work can also be seen as providing something of a bridge between them. His readings of Heidegger and Gadamer are characterised by an emphasis on argumentative reconstruction and clarity of exposition, while his interpretation and development of Davidson’s thought emphasises the broader philosophical and meta-philosophical elements of the Davidsonian position (and so places greater emphasis on Davidson’s later writings as providing the framework for reading Davidson’s work as a whole).

Jeff Malpas was the founder of the University of Tasmania’s Centre for Applied Philosophy and Ethics, and held the position as director until 2005.

While Malpas draws on phenomenological and hermeneutic resources, his work in what he has termed ‘philosophical topography’ is also heavily indebted to analytic approaches in philosophy of mind and language. Malpas’ work is distinctive in its detailed conceptual analysis of topographical and spatial notions, for the methodological implications that it associates with the focus on place, and for its topographical analysis of self and identity (Malpas argues for an ‘externalist’ conception of self and mind, according to which human lives are indissolubly linked to the places in which those lives are lived). Malpas’s topographical approach has been developed in two volumes, Place and Experience (1999) and Heidegger’s Topology (2006) – the latter providing an analysis of the thought of German philosopher Martin Heidegger that is centred on the ideas of place and ‘topology’ (Heidegger himself talks of his thinking as a ‘topology of being’).

In November 2018 Malpas was elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Jeff Malpas FAHA (born 1958) is an Australian philosopher, currently Distinguished Professor at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Tasmania. Known for his work across the analytic and continental traditions, Malpas has also been at the forefront of contemporary philosophical research on the concept of place. Malpas is also active in commenting on issues of contemporary ethics and politics in the Tasmanian and Australian media.