人間主義 地理學의 理念과 方法

Abstract

This paper aims to review the idea and methodology of humanistic geography and to examine their applications to actual researches. Humanistic geography has originated from the reflection, overly simplified presuppositions and narrowly defined human nature of scientific approaches. The focus of humanistic geography is on people and their conditions in the geographical world.

Geograhical world evolves from the interplay of certainty and ambigutiy. And the

humanists regard man as an active agent and not simply as a passive ideal type molded by the environment. Since it is delusive to believe that we can recognize full objectivity in the human world. Hence, the understanding of geographical world can not be achieved only through the reification and quantification of all spatial phenomena. Furthermore, the human nature should not defined too narrowly for the purpose of study. In order to clarify the meaning of geographical phenomena in subjective context, it is necessary that traditional positivistic perspectives should be converted

to humanistic ones. These mean changes from universal and abstract space into unique and concrete place, and also from quantity and size-oriented recognition into quality and contents-oriented one.