Rethinking Nature Research Articles

<b> Book Review of <i>Rethinking Nature: Challenging Disciplinary Boundaries</i></b> // Reseña de <i>Rethinking Nature: Challenging Disciplinary Boundaries</i>

Book Review of Rethinking Nature: Challenging Disciplinary Boundaries.Resumen Reseña de Rethinking Nature: Challenging Disciplinary Boundaries.

Return to the Repressive: Re-thinking Nature- Culture in Contemporary Feminist Theory

Abstract In “History of Sexuality” (Vol I.) Foucault argued that repression is the wrong model of power, understanding it in exclusively negative terms, as external to the body it constrains and inhibits. Power may also be positive, productive, and constitutive of the body and its possibilities. Thus, an adequate account of the relation between cultural forces and the body, Foucault argues, must challenge the “repressive hypothesis” (RH). Contemporary feminist accounts of the body are structured by this same oppositional view of power Foucault assumed: to call on Rosi Braidotti’s distinction, discursive (cultural) forces are either negative or repressive (potestas) or positive and empowering (potentia). In this paper I argue that this opposition forecloses several possibilities for thinking the morphogenetic role of culture. In particular, it assumes wrongly that repressive relations cannot be productive.

Ruderal Ecologies: Rethinking Nature, Migration, and the Urban Landscape in Berlin

Engaging with a series of human–plant encounters in Berlin, this article explores possibilities for rethinking the heterogeneity of urban life in the ruins of European nationalism and capitalism. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and revisiting Berlin’s postwar history of botanical research, I develop the concept of the ruderal and expand it for an anthropological inquiry of urban life. The term ruderal was originally used by Berlin ecologists after the Second World War to refer to ecologies that spontaneously inhabit disturbed environments: the spaces alongside train tracks or roads, wastelands, or rubble. Exploring Berlin as a ruderal city, I direct attention to the often unnoticed, cosmopolitan, and unruly ways of remaking the urban fabric at a time of increased nationalism and ecological destruction. Tracing human–plant socialities in encounters between scientists and rubble plants, in public culture, and among immigrants and their makeshift urban gardens, the lens of the ruderal directs ethnographic analysis toward the city’s unintended ecologies as these are produced in the context of nation-making, war, xenophobia, migration, environmental change, and contemporary austerity policies. Attending to ruderal worlds, I argue, requires telling stories that do not easily add up but that combine environmental perspectives with the study of migration, race, and social inequality—in the interest of mapping out possibilities for change. This framework thus expands a recent anthropological focus on ruins, infrastructure, and urban landscapes by highlighting questions of social justice that are at stake in emerging urban ecologies and an era of inhospitable environments.

The Hand of Nature in the Glove of Phenomenology: Reply to Gallagher

This article outlines several important agreements between Lynne Rudder Baker’s philosophical program and Shaun Gallagher’s target article, while also highlighting important differences. Like Gallagher, Baker does not believe that nature can be adequately understood from a reductive point of view. Unlike Gallagher, however, she argues against rethinking nature (or science) as a non-reductionist project, which instead focuses on ‘holistic relations (brain-body-environment)’ and not just on brains, for example. Regardless of whether the classic conception of nature is mainly a philosophical or a scientific construction, Baker argues we should leave the definition of science to the scientists. We can then begin with the classic conception of nature and show what in nature cannot be explained by science so conceived. The robust first-person perspective, she claims, is precisely one such feature of nature: a dispositional property that no naturalist can accept as ontologically significant. So, while Baker agrees with Gallagher that the classic conception of nature (and science) is reductionistic, she does not accept that the sciences—whether reductionistic or not—can explain everything in nature. If that is right, then scientific naturalism, which does accept this claim, is straightforwardly false.

Reflection on Rethinking Nature: Philosophy in the Field

This paper seeks to highlight the importance of field science in rethinking nature and our ecological perspective as human beings and integral parts of our natural earth. In doing this, I explain geology as a field science and its historical background in the philosophy in the field; explicate what is environing world; emphasize the understanding of human rationality; define boundaries; clarify the reductionist view of geology to physics; enumerate and state Newton's Laws of Motion; explain thermodynamic system in nature; explain the meaning of the laboratory as an unreal place; define elemental earth; explain the earth as reconfigured elemental; explicate the relationship between demotic opinion and schema of production; and rationalize the role of leadership in preserving and conserving the elemental earth. The conclusion includes the comprehensive explanations of all the above-mentioned items which are helpful in understand our elemental earth. Therefore, we, as human beings on earth, should develop awareness and respect to our geo-ecological environment by observing with fealty the ethics of ecology to the earth.

Re-thinking Nature, Fact and Fiction

In the halcyon days of publishing in Australia, in the 1970s and 1980s, the University of Queensland Press (UQP) established an innovative series on the Australian Environment edited by Alan Gilpin. The series emerged from the flourishing scientific, environmental and conservation discourses. This was not the only way, or even then the central way, UQP addressed environmental issues. On the one hand, the Press actively supported the emergence of an Australian postcolonial canon in fiction and poetry through (re)publishing the works of Steele Rudd, Vance Palmer and Peter Carey. In the need to develop an international market for their books, however, fiction editors could easily and did edit out descriptions of the Australian environments. On the other hand, the Press published technical studies such as a series on Australian Ecology. With the rupture in the management of the Press in 1983, the Australian Environment series was stopped. By the 1990s with the increasing recognition of the Australian Aboriginal way of thinking about country (and the delineation of Australasian territorial copyright) UQP pulled back from developing a global market in order to establish a successful Black Australian Writers series for, primarily, a national readership. The genre of 'bush realism' and other new writing by non-Indigenous Australians that drew on environmental differences of the 'new world' in contrast to the old, as a result, shifted away from central stage in narratives of the nation.

Naturalizing Continental philosophy: breaking ground in environmental thinking

As the field of environmental and ecological philosophy continues to gain general and periodically even enthusiastic acceptance in the broader discipline of philosophy, it should come as no surprise that the voice of Continental philosophy is becoming increasingly heard. Among the more recent contri butions in the literature is Bruce Foltz and Robert Frodeman's anthology Rethinking Nature: Essays in Environmental Philosophy, which gathers to gether creative and critical work done in the past decade by a number of the most influential and well-known voices in Continental philosophy. The 20 essays contained in the volume, not to mention the nicely composed and helpful editors' Introduction, draw on both historical and contemporary philosophical sources, while simultaneously advancing environmental thinking through an engagement with a range of concrete scenarios and issues. Nearly all the essays are drawn from papers that were initially presented at the first annual meetings of the International Association for Environmental Philos ophy (IAEP), of which Foltz and Frodeman were founding members. This collection is, however, more than just a compilation of conference proceed ings. Not only does it have the merit of having been previously refereed by IAEP, but all of the essays have consequently been revised and expanded, benefiting from both rigorous post-presentation discussion and excellent editing, with the final result being an engaging, provocative, and genuinely unique contribution to environmental thinking. Continental philosophy suf fers (justifiably at times) from the perception that its discourse is often closed to those outside its parameters, which makes Rethinking Nature all the more

Introduction: Nature, Environmental Ethics, and Continental Philosophy

Until recently, there has been relatively little self-conscious reflection - from either environmental or continental philosophers - on the specific contributions which continental philosophy, insofar as it is a distinctive tradition, might make to environmental thought. This situation has begun to change with several recent publications, such as Charles S. Brown and Ted Toadvine's (2003) edited collection <cite>Ecophenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself</cite>, and Bruce V. Foltz and Robert Frodeman's (2004) collection <cite>Rethinking Nature: Essays in Environmental Philosophy</cite>. This special issue aims to continue the discussion of how the continental tradition might advance or transform environmental thinking, both by reconsidering authors such as Kant, Schelling, Nietzsche and Heidegger, and by considering how themes and concepts from continental philosophy and social theory - including Merleau-Ponty's concept of flesh, Foucault's notion of discipline, and Bourdieu's social critique of taste - bear on environmental practice and theory.

Re-Thinking Nature: Towards an Eco-Pluralism

Both scientific realism and social constructionism offer unpromising and even destructive ways of trying to understand nature and human–nature relations. The reasons include what these apparent opponents share: a commitment to the (latterly) modernist division between subject/culture and object/nature that results from what is here called ‘monist essentialism’. It is contrasted with ‘relational pluralism’, which provides the basis of a better alternative – ecopluralism – which, properly understood, is necessarily both ecocentric and pluralist.

Re-Thinking Nature: Towards an Eco-Pluralism

Both scientific realism and social constructionism offer unpromising and even destructive ways of trying to understand nature and human–nature relations. The reasons include what these apparent opponents share: a commitment to the (latterly) modernist division between subject/culture and object/nature that results from what is here called ‘monist essentialism’. It is contrasted with ‘relational pluralism’, which provides the basis of a better alternative – ecopluralism – which, properly understood, is necessarily both ecocentric and pluralist.

Re-thinking nature—culture

This article explores the implications of `the new genetics' for anthropology as questions of articulation, connection, and relation — or as the production of difference. Using Marilyn Strathern's model of merographic connection, and drawing on recent ethnographic work on the new genetics, including my own, the question of what kinds of connections and relations are being forged through emergent forms of genetic information is critically explored both empirically and theoretically. In particular, the theme of a genetic `gap', between `objective' genetic facts and socially-forged identities and categorizations, provides the occasion to contrast different ethnographic and theoretical models of the social meaning of DNA. I argue that the ways in which genetic information is always partial — in both senses, of being already invested with presumptions and always incomplete — have consequences for how genetic connections are formed, and genetic relationships are understood. The desire to extract `clear' biological messages from genes conflicts with the desire to instruct, and alter, them, recapitulating a familiar hybridity at the heart of English kinship thinking — that our biology is both made and bred.