Nature and the Human World: Existential Crisis

Catalog description

Recent upheaval in our individual and collective livessuch as from the global COVID-19 pandemic, or from the catastrophic effects of climate changecalls for critical and creative reflection on relations between nature and our humanly built worlds. Engaging a range of perspectives in modern philosophy, the history of Christianity, and American agrarian and ecological thinking, this course explores both the existential lessons we can learn when our worlds undergo crisis and the roles that nature can play within our experience of such existential crisis. Authors to be studied include St. Augustine, Martin Heidegger, Michel Serres, Henry Bugbee, Wendell Berry, and Annie Dillard.