Abstract
Our inherited ideas of nature, animals, and ecology are contestable, and don't form a coherent or plausible unity. Within the European tradition Stoics and Epicureans offer useful contrasts between atomistic and holistic understandings of nature, and of our relations with the nonhuman, as well as partly congruent advice. On either account species are not natural kinds, and anthropocentric views of nature are at odds both with tradition and with modern science. On Epicurean and modern accounts final causes do not matter. But we must still think carefully about them in our practical ethics: recognizing at least that our present human goals are not the only ones. The transformation of all things adumbrated in “religion” suggests that we may live the dream of mutual justice and kindness even without expecting a literal apocalypse or trusting in a transcendent God. But it would be premature to deny the possibility of exactly such an apocalypse.
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