The Timespace of Human Activity: On Performance, Society, and History as Indeterminate Teleological Events (Toposophia: Thinking Place/Making Space) - Tapa dura

With this book, Ted Schatzki provides a remarkable synthesis and expansion of his past work. By adding considerations of time and space, practice, and the role of performance, the ceremonial, and teleological in human action to a Heideggerian starting point, he gives us a novel approach to the philosophy of action that gets beyond formalism and meaningfully connects with substantive problems. -- Stephen Turner, University of South Florida In this exciting and inspiring book, Schatzki turns previous accounts of social practice inside-out to reveal the timespace of human activity. With each chapter new lines of enquiry come tumbling forth, challenging and at the same time invigorating established agendas across sociology, psychology, history, and geography. -- Elizabeth Shove, Lancaster University Ted Schatzki is a leading figure in the philosophy of the social sciences. The Timespace of Human Activity represents a major development of the philosophy of practice, articulated in his previous books. Drawing principally on the work of Martin Heidegger, Ted Schatzki explores the way in which the world is constituted through human activity activity and how that world influences the very possibility of our existence. Schatzki builds his analysis through careful exegesis of the works of Heidegger, Lefebvre, Bergson, and others, interspersing his interpretations with vivid examples from everyday life. The book speaks to existential issues which have become central to contemporary debates in the social sciences and philosophy and will be required reading for all those interested in what it is to be human. -- Anthony King, University of Exeter

This book develops an original Heideggerian account of the timespace and indeterminacy of human activity while describing insights that this account provides into the nature of activity, society and history. Drawing on empirical examples, the book argues that activity timespace is a key component of social space and time, shows that interwoven timespaces form an essential infrastructure of social phenomena, offers a novel account of the existence of the past in the present, and defends the teleological character of emotional and ceremonial actions.