[SydPhil] UNSW seminar: Dr Dalia Nassar, Romanticism after the "End of Nature"

[Joanne Faulkner]

Date:               Tuesday 28 May
Time:              1 p.m.
Venue:           Morven Brown 310, University of NSW (map reference C20: (1.7MB)<http://www.facilities.unsw.edu.au/Maps/pdf/kensington.pdf>)


Dr Dalia Nassar (University of Sydney)

Romanticism after the ‘End of Nature’
Since Bill McKibben’s 1989 book, The End of Nature, it has become commonplace to pronounce the ‘end’ of that which, for many decades, we called nature. Although in many instances the reiterations of the end of nature do not agree with McKibben’s reasoning — instead, offering reasons quite contrary to his — they concur on the premise that nature is not a plausible or desirable concept for environmental thought or activism. Alongside this growing trend in environmental philosophy, a number of studies have recently appeared which reconsider the environmental significance of romanticism. While an environmental interest in romanticism is not surprising, it is very surprising given the increasingly pervasive critique of the idea of nature. After all, for the romantics, nature (not the environment, or ecology, or biodiversity) was the most significant and central concern. In this paper, I consider the relevance of German romantic philosophy for environmental thought, first, by distinguishing different traditions within German romanticism, and second, by arguing that a particular tradition--what I call ‘romantic empiricism’--remains relevant even in light of, or especially in light of, the critique of the idea of nature.


Dalia Nassar is an ARC DECRA Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Sydney and Assistant Professor at Villanova University, USA. Her research interests include Kant and German idealism, the idea of nature and the history of natural philosophy, and environmental philosophy and ethics. She is the author of The Romantic Absolute: Being and Knowing in Early German Romantic Philosophy 1795-1804 (U. of Chicago P., forthcoming 2013), and has published articles in Review of Metaphysics, the Goethe Yearbook, and the Journal of the History of Philosophy. She is currently writing a philosophical account of the idea of nature in German philosophy from 1780-1850, beginning with Kant and concluding with the naturalist (natural historian), Alexander von Humboldt.



Coordinator:
Dr Joanne Faulkner, j.faulkner at unsw.edu.au
School of Humanities

Dr Joanne Faulkner
ARC DECRA Research Fellow
School of Humanities
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Room 338, Morven Brown Building
University of New South Wales
Kensington, NSW 2052
Australia

j.faulkner at unsw.edu.au
+61 2 9385 2287
http://humanities.arts.unsw.edu.au/staff/joanne-faulkner-633.html

http://unsw.academia.edu/JoanneFaulkner

Co-Government/Institutional Representative, Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy: http://www.ascp.org.au

Branch Vice-President, UNSW Branch of the NTEU, National Tertiary Education Industry Union: http://www.nteu.edu.au
NTEU Office Tel: +61 2 9385 2479, email: nteu at unsw.edu.au<mailto:nteu at unsw.edu.au>
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