The literary critic Raymond Williams said of nature that it was &ldquo\;perhaps the \;most complex word in the language.&rdquo\; Certainly it has figured ambiguously in the philosophical tradition: sometimes identified with everything\, sometimes \;nothing. In Enlightenment\, as 'natural philosophy' was gradually transformed \;into or replaced by mathematical natural science\, nature became \;disenchanted\, controlled\, ravaged by a humanity who could no longer quite \;understand how they had a place in it. This itself has had a vast impact on \;the philosophical tradition: from the early German Romantics to Adorno &\; \;Horkheimer and\, more recently\, John McDowell.
Can we appeal to nature to defeat skepticism? What is nature\, is it a useful \;category? Is there room for any notion of the 'supernatural' (as in: \;something beyond nature) in philosophy? How should we respond to the ways in \;which nature has been controlled in Enlightenment? Is humanity meaningfully \;a part of nature? Is all history also natural-history\, or is nature \;something that we should attempt to supersede? These are just some of the \;questions that confront us when we attempt to engage with the idea of nature \;philosophically.
In this conference\, we seek to explore these sorts of questions relating to \;the philosophy of nature understood in the broadest possible sense. \;
Contact: \;pygradc@essex.ac.uk.
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