Is the concept of “nature” dispensable?
Resumen
In response to the arguments of Bill McKibben and of Steven Vogel that nature is at an end and that the very concept of nature should be discarded, I argue that the concept of nature is indispensable. A third sense of “nature” besides the two distinguished by Vogel, that of the nature of an organism, is shown, through five arguments, to be vital for environmental philosophy and for ethics in general. It is no coincidence that the same term is used for all three senses of ‘nature’ in many languages. The indispensability of ‘nature’ in the third sense is used to suggest the indispensability of ‘nature’ in the other senses (needed if we are to understand species, to distinguish social systems from natural systems, and to be able to ask metaphysical questions about whether ‘nature’ in this sense and in the other two might have a creator).
Key words: Nature, McKibben, Vogel, environmental philosophy, ethics, senses of ‘nature’, species, artifacts, natural systems, supernatural explanations, givenness.
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Anthony Giddens, Beyond Left and Right, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994, cited in Michael Bonnet, “Retrieving nature: education for a post-humanist age”, Journal of Philosophy of Education 37(4), 2003, pp. 550-730, at p. 557.
Michael E. Soulé and Gary Lease (eds.), Reinventing Nature?: Responses to Modern Deconstruction , Washington, DC and Covelo, CA: Island Press, 1995.
Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution, San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1980.
Bill McKibben, The End of Nature, London: Viking, 1990.
Stephen Vogel, “Environmental philosophy after the end of nature”, Environmental Ethics 24, 2002, pp. 23-39.
Stephen Vogel, “The nature of artifacts”, Environmental Ethics 25, 2003, pp. 149-168.
Michael Soulé, “The social siege of nature”, in Soulé and Lease, pp. 137-170, atp. 149. The inner quotation is from N. Katherine Hayles, “Searching for common ground”, Soulé and Lease, pp. 47-63.
Stephen Vogel, “Marx and alienation from nature”, Social Theory and Practice 14(3): 367-388, 1988.
John Habgood, The Concept of Nature, London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2002
Habgood, pp. 2f.
Holmes Rolston, Genes, Genesis and God, Values and their Origins in Natural and Human History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Habgood, p.14.
William Shakespeare, A Winter’s Tale, IV, iv, 86-97.
Habgood, p.14.
Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879, pp. 1189-1190.
Teresa Kwiatkowska, “The concept of nature”, in Tom Robinson and LauraWestra (eds.), Thinking about the Environment, Lexington Books, 2002.
Ibid.
Kenneth E. Goodpaster, “On being morally considerable,” Journal of Philosophy 75, 1978, 308-325; Routley, Richard, “Is there a need for a new, an environmental ethics?”, Proceedings of the Fifteenth World Congress of Philosophy (Varna, 1973), pp. 205-210.
Mary Midgley, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature, Hassocks, Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1978, e.g. at pp. 19-24.
Geoffrey Warnock, Contemporary Moral Philosophy, London: Macmillan and New York: St Martin’s Press, 1967, p. 60.
Steven Vogel, “Marx and alienation from nature” Social Theory and Practice 14 (3): 367-388, 1988.
Habgood, p.17.
I am grateful to Cardiff University and to the UK Arts and HumanitiesResearch Council for making possible the preparation and completion of this article, in connection with the preparation of a related book entitled “Creation, Evolution and Meaning”, for which each of these bodies granted one semester of research leave. This book is due to be published by Ashgate (at Aldershot, UK) during the second half of 2006.
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