Syllabus
22. 2. Úvod: vymezení tématu a stručné dějiny mnohoznačného pojmu „příroda“ (od Homérovy Odysseie ke Kantovi a romantice) 29. 2. Emerson, „Příroda“, in Příroda a duch, přel.
Josef Špaček a Čeněk Kočí Praha, Laichter, 1927, pouze s. 3-10, 14-22, 62-72. 7. 3. Thoreau, „Chůze“, in Toulky přírodou, přel.
Jan Hokeš, Praha a Litomyšl, Paseka, 2010, pouze s. 7-16, 24-37. 14. 3. Malcolm Budd, „The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature as Nature“, in The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2002, 1-23. 21. 3. seminář se nekoná 28. 3. děkanské volno (Zelený čtvrtek) 4. 4.
Bill McKibben, „A New Atmosphere“, in The End of Nature, London, Bloomsbury, 1990, 3-46. 11. 4. Steven Vogel, „Against Nature“, in Thinking Like a Mall: Environmental Philosophy after the End of Nature, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2015, 1-31. 18. 4.
Daniel B. Botkin, „A View from a Marsh: Myths and Facts About Nature“, in The Moon in the Nautilus Shell: Discordant Harmonies Reconsidered, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012, 3-22. 25. 4.
Bruno Latour, „On the Instability of the (Notion of) Nature“, in Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime (First Lecture), Cambridge, Polity Press, 2017, 7-40. 2. 5. Freya Mathews, „Relating to Nature: Deep Ecology or Ecofeminism?“, in Lara Stevens, Peta Tait, Denise Varney (eds.), Feminist Ecologies: Changing Environments in the Anthropocene, London, Palgrave, 2018, 35-55. 9. 5.
Michel Loreau, „A Brief History of the Divorce between Humans and Nature“, in Nature That Makes Us Human. Why We Keep Destroying Nature and How We Can Stop Doing So, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2023, 25-42. 16. 5.
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Annotation
“NATURE, in the common sense, refers to essences unchanged by man; space, the air, the river, the leaf. ART is applied to the mixture of his will with the same things, as in a house, a canal, a statue, a picture.
Note But his operations taken together are so insignificant Note, a little chipping, baking, patching, and washing, that in an impression so grand as that of the world on the human mind, they do not vary the result” (Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1836). “There is no longer any doubt that humans have had a destructive impact on their natural environment for quite a long time” (Michel Loreau, 2023). At first glance, these two texts seem to say the opposite.
The aim of this course is to offer a closer look that challenges this polarity: Emerson is not talking about the resilience of nature to practical human activity. He is talking about the relative permanence of the impression that hypothetical nature as a whole makes on us.
It is this constancy that is one of the reasons why we are unable to alter our impression of nature according to the changes that we are making in the world over a long period of time, and increasingly so. In traditional philosophical terminology, we will be concerned with the tension between nature as a source of wealth and a place for a Sunday walk, and the idea of transcendental “nature” as a purposefully ordered whole that cannot be contained or changed from any particular position.
Selected texts from 1836 to 2023 present different facets of this tension and a growing critique of the understanding of nature as a unified, autonomous domain that can be clearly separated from the activity of particular living organisms, including humans.