"Second edition published 1988. Third edition published 1999... Fourth edition published 2009...."--Title page verso.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 218-241) and index.

Machine generated contents note: 1.What Is Geography? -- Introduction: dream and reality -- Popular and professional notions on geography -- Place, space, territoriality and globalization -- Homo geographicus -- Geography between physical science, social science and arts -- Exploration and the cosmographic tradition -- A science of synthesis -- Man and nature sustainability: a major research focus -- Thinking geographically -- 2.The Roots Of Geography -- Geography in the ancient world -- Herodotus -- Eratosthenes -- Ptolemy -- Strabo -- The Middle Ages and the Renaissance -- Arab Geographers -- Europeans -- China -- The Renaissance -- Varenius -- Immanuel Kant -- The 'classical' period -- Humboldt -- Ritter -- Legacies of the early historic development -- 3.From Cosmography To An Institutionalized Discipline -- Geographical societies -- Geography becomes an academic discipline -- Geography at British universities -- The USA -- The 'New' Geography -- Darwinism -- The social anarchists -- Reclus -- Kropotkin -- Geomorphology and physiography provide academic respect -- The German school of geomorphology -- Huxley and Davis -- Environmental determinism -- Ratzel, Kjellen and Mackinder -- The promotion of determinism -- Achievements in the period of institutionalization -- 4.The Regional Tradition -- The advent of possibilism -- The French school of regional geography -- The Methode Vidalienne -- Regional monographs and the Annales school -- Landscapes and regions -- Landscape chronology -- Landscape ecology -- Landscape morphology -- Regional studies in Britain -- Patrick Geddes -- The regional approach, critics and achievements -- 5.The Growth Of Spatial Science -- Changing job market -- The development of applied geography -- A discipline ripe for change -- Quantification and models -- Swedish innovations -- Contributions to spatial science in the UK -- Absolute and relative space -- Critics of the spatial science school -- The achievements of spatial science -- Preliminary conclusions -- 6.Paradigms And Revolutions -- Kuhn's paradigms -- Critics of Kuhn -- Induction and deduction -- Popper and critical rationalism -- Changing paradigms in geography? -- An idiographic or nomothetic science? -- What kind of revolution? -- A 'critical' revolution? -- Revolution or evolution? -- 7.Positivism And Its Critics -- Positivism and critical theory -- The development of positivism -- Principles in positivism -- Critics of positivism -- Dialectics, Hegel and Marx: breaking down binaries -- Science as a force transforming society -- Practical consequences for research -- Geography and empiricism -- The positivism of spatial science -- 8.Alternatives To Spatial Science -- Multi-paradigmatic development -- Humanistic approaches -- Behavioural and welfare geography -- Structuralism -- Marxist geographies -- Achievements of the early alternatives to spatial science -- 9.Post-Structuralism And Beyond -- Structuration theory -- Critical realism -- A useful methodological approach -- Post-industrialism, post-structuralism and postmodernism -- Post-structuralism -- Postmodernism -- Gender and feminist geography -- Summary -- 10.Geographical Tasks In A Globalizing World -- The missing histories of geography -- Critical geopolitics and the revival of political geography -- Post-colonialism -- New cultural geography and non-representational theory -- The rediscovery of nature: actor-network theory and hybridity -- Researching human and nature sustainability -- Neo-liberalism and geography of poverty and affluence -- Time-space compression and the changing relations between place, space and scale: assemblage theory -- Changing worlds, changing tools: satellite photos and GIS -- Future geographies.

This introduction to the history, philosophy and methodology of human geography explores complex ideas in an intelligible and accessible style. It takes into account the new developments in geographical thought and methods.