The Fundamental Field

Jeff Malpas is an Australian philosopher and is currently Emeritus Distinguished Professor at the University of Tasmania in Hobart and Distinguished Visiting Professor at LaTrobe University in Melbourne. He was founder, and until 2005, Director, of the University of Tasmania's Centre for Applied Philosophy and Ethics. His work is grounded in post-Kantian thought, especially the hermeneutical and phenomenological traditions, as well as in analytic philosophy of language and mind, and draws on the thinking of a diverse range of thinkers and writers including, most notably, Albert Camus, Donald Davidson, Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer.

A Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities, he is the author, among other works, of Place and Experience (Routledge, 2018) and Heidegger's Topology (MIT, 2006). He lives in the Huon Valley in Tasmania.

Kenneth White was a Scottish poet, academic and writer. He published numerous works of poetry and prose, with volumes and essays in French as well as English. His work has also been translated into several languages.

He was the recipient of many awards and honours, in Europe and Scotland, including the Grand Prix du Rayonnement Francais by the Academie francaise for his work as a whole (1985), the Edouard Glissant prize from the University of Paris VIII for his 'openness to the cultures of the world' (2004) and Prix de poesie Alain Bosquet for Les Archives du Littoral, a bilingual poetry collection (2011). White held honorary doctorates from the University of Glasgow, the University of Edinburgh and the Open University and was an honorary member of the Royal Scottish Academy.

In 1989 he founded the International Institute of Geopoetics to promote further research into the cross-cultural, trans-disciplinary field of study which he had been developing during the previous decade. It has since produced six Cahiers de Geopoetique (journals) in French, publishing a range of work on geopoetics from throughout the world. Geopoetics Centres have since been set up in Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Serbia, Quebec, New Caledonia and France.

His publications in English include, Ideas of Order at Cape Wrath (2013), The Wanderer and his Charts (2004), Open World: The Collected Poems 1960-2000 (2003) and House of Tides (2000). He lived on the north coast of Brittany.