For the final class of the term, I want to focus our discussion of contemporary environmentalist through one question. Contemporary philosopher Graham Harman has said: 'Nature is not natural and can never be naturalised.' I want to see if we can work out what he means.
At first, I concede, it looks like a simply contradictory thing to say; but Harman means something particular, and (I think) important by it. We will talk about it in class, but by way of preparation you might want to do a bit of preliminary reading. Here is Harman's Wikipedia page; you might enjoy browsing his blog.
You might also find it interesting to take a look at the work of Timothy Morton, another philosopherwhose own blog takes that Harman quotation as its strapline. Morton specialises in environmental philosophy, and his first book was called Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Harvard UP 2007). I'd like you to do two things.
(1) Follow the link, there, to Morton's monograph on Google Books; they don't post the whole thing (and I wouldn't expect you to read the whole thing anyway); but spend half an hour browsing it, seeing if you can get a sense of what Morton's larger thesis is.
(2) Read this review of Morton's book by Vince Carducci. Again, the idea is to see if you can get a sense of what Morton is arguing, so you can see whether you agree with him or not.
