220006 Nature(s) and Environment(s): Readings on fundamental categories in scientific theory and Research (S) (WiSe 2018/2019)

‚Nature‘ as a term figures centrally in both scientific and everyday epistemologies. The sciences seek to ‘unravel the laws of nature’ while we go out ‘into nature’ to either have a hike or a protracted survival adventure, searching for deeper experience or merely leisurely exercise. We claim that certain behaviours are natural, while others are not (where the boundaries of which is which are surprisingly flexible).
Lately, discourses on the ‘anthropocene’ mourn the ‘death of nature’, claiming that those things untouched by humans cease to exist, thus eradicating the basis of subsistence that enabled our development. Building on a long tradition of diagnosing ‘modern humans’ as those alienated from their ‘natural state’, such formulations equally rest on the assumption of a prior state of unison from which at some point, mankind was severed. From this position, then, theories are and were developed one the one hand to explain the way nature functions, and on the other to provide normative accounts of human relations to it: Sciences and environmental ethics taking up both of these sides, while maintaining their difference in scope and approach.
The seminar will look at recent approaches from philosophy, anthropology, and the history of science that set out from this position and aim to work out an account of environmental ethics, politics, and epistemology that can make do without nature. Historical uses of ‘nature’ are thereby problematized allowing for an account of collectives of beings that overcome the totalizing approach to the world at the heart of a fundamentally Eurocentric concept. Beyond a nihilism of defeat having destroyed nature, environmental politics are developed that take into account the ecology of all things and allow for the development of positional ethics of local environments.

Requirements for participation, required level

Course language is English. Students are expected to be willing to read and participate in English. Apart from this, there are no requirements regarding proficiency or otherwise.

Bibliography

Latour, Bruno. 2004. Politics of nature. How to bring the sciences into democracy. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Ingold, Tim. 2008. The perception of the environment. Essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill. Reprint. London: Routledge.

Vogel, Steven. 2015. Thinking like a Mall. Environmental Philosophy after the End of Nature. Cambridge: MIT Press.