Philosophical Issues in Geography — An Introduction

Geography presents interesting and intricate trade-offs between empirical data and demands, on the one hand, and deep philosophical issues (from ontology to political philosophy), on the other. What is a geographic entity? What is the relationship between a geographic entity and a physical territory? Can a geographic entity survive without a territory or without definite borders? Can it survive radical changes in its territory? Are there clear-cut identity criteria for geographic categories? This paper serves as an introduction to a special issue of Topoi whose aim is to go a first step towards a better understanding of these questions and of their implications for the theory of the geographic world. The world of geography is extraordinarily varied. It includes mountains and rivers but also states and cities and voting precincts. It includes concrete parcels of land and water bodies as well as abstract fields of land-use and rain-fall. It includes natural topographic features such as bays, valleys, isthmuses, and promontories along with human-made artifacts such as dams, bridges, roads, railways, mountain passes. It includes naturally demarcated regions such as Australia or the island of Malta, as well as regions whose boundaries lie skew to any physical discontinuities, such as Utah and Saskatchewan; sharply demarcated territories such as the states of the Union, as well as vaguely defined territories such as deserts and plateaus. The world of geography includes unitary, connected entities as well as scattered ones, such as Polynesia or the USA; it includes material entities as well as immaterial ones, like tunnels and canyons; extended objects as well as unextended ones, such as the Poles or the Equator. Geography is about all these things and many other sorts of thing too, and parts and aggregates thereof, and the maps geographers draw are maps of this world of riches. One would imagine that given this apparent ontological variety, geography constitutes an ideal domain for philosophical inquiry—a happy hunting ground