This chapter discusses psychic contemplation as our participation in the contemplation of the World Soul, who creates the sensible world and time. As a result, we see the world as becoming alive and we transcend time by finding in ourselves the peace and rest of Nature, the lower power of the World Soul. The main faculty in ourselves which participates in Nature is imagination (and memory), although Nature herself doesn’t entertain perception, imagination, or memory. When we ascend to this level, we begin to live in the present, mindfully awake to our sensible experience, but also having a sense that we are something different from it. Sensible experience no longer deceives us because we see the sensible world in and through its archetypes, which are the logoi in Nature. Like a geometer who sees the intelligible structure of the square in squared sensible shapes, we intuitively see the essence of things (“what it is”) revealed to us through their qualities (“what it is like”).

This chapter begins by scrutinizing The Dharma Bums through the lens of the Romantic/Transcendentalist models that inspired the novel’s re-enchantment of nonhuman material creation. A second part turns to Kerouac’s haiku and The Scripture of the Golden Eternity to show how the concept of Buddhist “Emptiness” considerably enriches his Romantic/Transcendentalist sense of “field-being.” This section argues that the embeddedness of the human mind in the nonhuman combined with a serene acceptance of the latter’s elusiveness actually constitutes one of Kerouac’s important, if paradoxical, contributions to an understanding of the web of environmental continuities. By contrast, the third part moves from Kerouac’s ecospiritual holism to his deep-seated ecophobia: as found in “Desolation Journal,” Desolation Angels, and “Desolation Blues.” A fourth anddiscusses how, despite his environmental angst, Kerouac nevertheless experiments considerably at the level of ecopoetics, probing into a wildness of form that compensates, on the one hand, for the fear that untamed nature instills in his fiction and poetry, and on the other, for the limited presence of any wilderness in his city-inspired texts.

This chapter explores ways of thinking about ecology through the medium of composition, and how composing relates to the environments around us. It offers a methodological framework for composition that puts listening at the heart of a composer’s engagement with musical material and meaning making. Alongside the author’s examples there are a number of exercises and provocations to help developing one’s own approaches to composition.

Chapter 2 analyses some foundational ideas relied upon in the book. This conceptual base comprises an analysis of nature, the environment, development, and sustainable development. These concepts are discussed as a progressive movement of a complex ideation: where nature is conceptualised as the starting point, later becomes the environment, then advances to become development, and is finally transformed into sustainable development. I employ Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) in my analysis of neo-imperial ideologies and allied Eurocentric philosophies and how these are embedded in the contemporary language of sustainable development. At each stage of the analysis, I highlight the significance of human agency as the defining character of the transformations that occur within this conceptual fluidity. It accounts for the persistence of the subtext of Eurocentrism and demonstrates how the interplay of law, politics, ethics, and history as sustainable development is established upon different elements of both law and non-law theories. The analysis in this chapter is refracted through ’Afrosensitivity’, which I describe as a reaction to Africa as a conceptual tool in sustainable development discourse, and as a conscious, alternative route for imprinting African legal cosmologies on this global phenomenon called sustainable development.

Chapter 35 examines Goethe’s awareness of the impact of human activity on the physical environment and his often prescient depictions of damage to natural systems. These are shaped by a range of perspectives and experiences, from Goethe’s work as a civil servant, to his scientific study, to his lifelong passion for nature. The chapter traces two themes in particular that run through his literary work: first, flooding, and second, fire and the destruction of forests. It also examines Goethe’s historical position, between the pre-industrial world and capitalist modernity.

Experience is the cornerstone of Epicurean philosophy and nowhere is this more apparent than in the Epicurean views about the nature, formation, and application of concepts. ‘The Epicureans on Preconceptions and Other Concepts’ by Gábor Betegh and Voula Tsouna aims to piece together the approach to concepts suggested by Epicurus and his early associates, trace its historical development over a period of approximately five centuries, compare it with competing views, and highlight the philosophical value of the Epicurean account on that subject. It is not clear whether, properly speaking, the Epicureans can be claimed to have a theory about concepts. However, an in-depth discussion of the relevant questions will show that the Epicureans advance a coherent if elliptical explanation of the nature and formation of concepts and of their epistemological and ethical role. Also, the chapter establishes that, although the core of the Epicurean account remains fundamentally unaffected, there are shifts of emphasis and new developments marking the passage from one generation of Epicureans to another and from one era to the next.

‘Contested Concepts: Plutarch’s On Common Conceptions’ by Thomas Bénatouïl addresses the question of how ordinary concepts, for instance a layman’s concept of a spider, intersect with a zoologist’s concept of that insect. While from the epistemological point of view the latter’s concept should be allowed to prevail, from the point of view of semantics and the philosophy of mind it is not at all obvious that the scientific concept of spider should be allowed to rule over the corresponding lay concept, nor is it obvious that there is only one concept of spider whose content can be fixed for every context. Clearly, the Academics and the Stoics were aware of the importance of this and related problems. Plutarch’s dialogue On Common Conceptions, subtitled Against the Stoics, is a representative text of these schools’ respective stances, and its study by Thomas Bénatouïl aims to bring out both its historical significance and systematic interest.

Research on the topic of being solitary in nature – as opposed to the well-documented effects of simply being in nature – is still very new. But we can speculate about what may be going on when those two states are combined. In our Solitude Lab, we’ve heard from adventurers of all calibers that the combination of solitude and nature can foster a kind of supercharged state that seems to enhance the benefits of both nature and solitude while conferring entirely new benefits of it own. Here we discuss nature’s effects on people, soft fascination, and attention restoration theory.

This chapter explores the Histories’ interest in human nature on the battlefield in terms of valour. It reviews instances in which the historical actors – including Pixodarus, Xerxes, and Themistocles – foreground the strategic importance of "surpassing nature." This is a motif that places the speakers in a network of sophistic and later, Platonic, theories on man’s desire to outstrip his own nature. At stake is a philosophy of "superior nature" that is strongly undercut by the complexity of the action on the battlefield.

This chapter examines Shelley’s images of the collapse of human civilizations and the colonization of their ruins by a darkly resurgent nature. In particular, it places Shelley’s fascination with civilizational collapse and natural overgrowth in the context of recent conceptions of “rewilding.” It argues that “rewilding” as currently conceived by its leading advocates remains an irreducibly human project, whereas Shelleyan overgrowth conceives of a resurgent nature that both occludes and darkly perpetuates the ruins of humanity. A number of key moments in Shelley’s work are central here: his description in his preface to Prometheus Unbound of the situation of the composition of that poem; a fragment of 1818, “Flourishing vine, whose kindling clusters glow”; and the description in Adonais of “Desolation’s bones.” Through close readings of these episodes, the chapter shows that Shelleyan overgrowth represents what we may call a “dark rewilding” – which is for us, as it was for Shelley, a future that human civilization increasingly appears to anticipate. Shelley anticipates many of the conceptual and ethical complexities of today’s rewilding, articulating instead a more ambivalent, less obviously hopeful conception of overgrowth as the eerie perpetuation of the ruins of a disappeared humanity.

This chapter explores Wagner’s rhetorical elisions across three substantives essential to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conceptual history: nature, culture, and humanity. It begins by explicating Wagner’s engagement with contemporary philosophies of language, cognition, and climate in developing the racialised identities and implications of these interlocked categories. Disclosing Wagner’s participation in what philosopher Stephen Haymes describes as an ‘axiological preference for Western “holism” regarding what is valued’, this chapter suggests that his nature-thinking enforced an exclusionary humanism by elevating a Germanic subset of nature, culture, and humanity as solely deserving these monolithic titles.

The chapter concludes by exploring Wagner’s treatment of these categories in his libretti, particularly in Siegfried’s ‘forest murmurs’. Where some stage directors have sought to resuscitate Wagner by suggesting that his environmental imagery is separable from his infamous racism, this chapter ultimately argues that these conceptual paradigms were inextricably entwined, and were part of a synthetic regime of knowledge.

Long was committed to a depiction of Jamaica as a successful ‘commercial society’ where white people could live comfortably on the labour of the enslaved. He mapped the island for his readers in such a way as to reassure them that the boundaries between the free and the unfree were secure. His picture provided a full account of island defences, against both external and internal enemies. He drew on his favourite English poets and writers to inspire poetic renditions of the beauties of this tropical paradise in which art and nature combined their glories. The island’s fecundity was there to be harnessed for profit. His racialized cartography utilized maps, engravings, tables and listings of commodities to illustrate boundless potential. Nature could be improved, tamed and catalogued, as people were. Alarming tales of colonists’ mortality could be challenged, mosquitoes kept at bay. White settlers could live a healthy life if only they would embrace moderation in all things. As an Enlightenment man and an enthusiastic reader of natural histories, Long was keen to represent the island as en route to a more civilized and ordered state, with more roads, more maps, more barracks, more settlements. But, he had to admit, it was a society sorely in need of more public virtue.

We all know that Alzheimer’s is an enormous problem. Thousands of researchers around the world are tirelessly searching for clues that might lead to a solution – how to slow or prevent Alzheimer’s. Reports of new findings are in the news almost daily. How do we know what is potentially important?