Synopses & Reviews
From Mastery to Mystery is an original and provocative contribution to the burgeoning field of ecophenomenology. Informed by current debates in environmental philosophy, Bannon critiques the conception of nature as ?“substance” that he finds tacitly assumed by the major environmental theorists. Instead, this book reconsiders the basic goals of an environmental ethic by questioning the most basic presupposition that most environmentalists accept: that nature is in need of preservation.
Beginning with Bruno Latour’s idea that continuing to speak of nature in the way we popularly conceive of it is ethically and politically disastrous, this book describes a way in which the concept of nature can retain its importance in our discussion of the contemporary state of the environment. Based upon insights from the phenomenological tradition, specifically the work of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the concept of nature developed in the book preserves the best antihumanistic intuitions of environmentalists without relying on either a reductionistic understanding of nature and the sciences or dualistic metaphysical constructions.
About the Author
Bryan E. Bannon is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of North Florida.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
The Question of Nature
1 The Promise of a Common World
i. Nature and the Modern World
ii. Rejecting Naturpolitik
iii. Re-collecting the Pluriverse into a Common World
iv. Conclusion
2 Science, Technology, and the Closure of Nature
i. Phenomenology and Subjectivism
ii. The Twofold Essence of Physis at the Inception of Philosophy
iii. The Rise of Technology and the Devastation of the Earth
iv. Conclusion
3 The Opening of the Earth
i. Deciding against the System of Nature
ii. Ereignis and the Restoration of Nature
iii. Conclusion
4 Merleau-Ponty and Nature as the Common World
i. The Behavior of Nature
ii. Reading the Prose of the World
iii. The Flesh of Nature
iv. A Prospect from within Nature
v. The Dialectic of Nature and History
vi. Conclusion
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index