Course Description
Summary
Is there still such a thing as the natural world in 2021, and, if so, how do we conceptualize it? By way of answering this question, we’ll read work by philosophers, anthropologists, biologists, and literary critics, all of whom in one way or another pose the question of how to think about nature in the midst of the Anthropocene. Can we, as humans, de-center the human? Can we imagine our engagement with the environment in ways that are neither utopian nor apocalyptic? What vocabularies, what concepts might help us to do these things? Readings by Charles Sanders Pierce, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Gilles Deleuze Félix Guattari, Donna Haraway, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Eduardo Kohn, Timothy Morton, and others.
