Suchergebnisse

The Enlightenment remains widely associated with the rise of scientific progress and the loss of religious faith, a dual tendency that is thought to have contributed to the disenchantment of the world. In her wide-ranging and richly illustrated book, Tili Boon Cuillé questions the accuracy of this narrative by investigating the fate of the marvelous in the age of reason.

Exploring the affinities between the natural sciences and the fine arts, Cuillé examines the representation of natural phenomena—whether harmonious or discordant—in natural history, painting, opera, and the novel from Buffon and Rameau to Ossian and Staël. She demonstrates that philosophical, artistic, and emotional responses to the ""spectacle of nature"" in eighteenth-century France included wonder, enthusiasm, melancholy, and the ""sentiment of divinity."" These ""passions of the soul,"" traditionally associated with religion and considered antithetical to enlightenment, were linked to the faculties of reason, imagination, and memory that structured Diderot's Encyclopédie and to contemporary theorizations of the sublime. As Cuillé reveals, the marvelous was not eradicated but instead preserved through the establishment and reform of major French cultural institutions dedicated to science, art, religion, and folklore that were designed to inform, enchant, and persuade.

This book has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor.

Empirical research in the psychology of nature appreciation suggests that humans across cultures tend to evaluate nature in positive aesthetic terms, including a sense of beauty and awe. They also frequently engage in joint attention with other persons, whereby they are jointly aware of sharing attention to the same event or object. This paper examines how, from a natural theological perspective, delight in natural beauty can be conceptualized as a way of joining attention to creation. Drawing an analogy between art and creation, we propose that aesthetic appreciation of nature may provide theists with a unique phenomenological insight into God's creative intentions, which are embodied in the physical beauty of creation. We suggest two directions in which this way of looking at the natural world can be fleshed out: in a spontaneous way, that does not take into account background information, and with the help of science.

In 2016, "America's Best Idea", the United States National Park System, celebrated a century of national heritage in natural resource stewardship. As the NPS progresses into its next century, reflection on the semiotics of national park tourism offers a critical perspective on meanings of American Nationalism and identity with management implications for a twenty first century audience. This research acknowledges the originating confluences of artistic and literary romanticism, commercialization of natural resources through tourism, and political annexation of public land during the Reconstruction Era in the establishment of an institutional model that advanced the "monumentalism" of nature. This research analyses the varied political ecology of nature through the lens of historic design and rhetoric concerning cultural landscapes, the people within them, and periods of national crises using national park case studies. This research will offer clarifying perspectives on how nature itself became a national monument in these places.

In 2016, "America's Best Idea", the United States National Park System, celebrated a century of national heritage in natural resource stewardship. As the NPS progresses into its next century, reflection on the semiotics of national park tourism offers a critical perspective on meanings of American Nationalism and identity with management implications for a twenty first century audience. This research acknowledges the originating confluences of artistic and literary romanticism, commercialization of natural resources through tourism, and political annexation of public land during the Reconstruction Era in the establishment of an institutional model that advanced the "monumentalism" of nature. This research analyses the varied political ecology of nature through the lens of historic design and rhetoric concerning cultural landscapes, the people within them, and periods of national crises using national park case studies. This research will offer clarifying perspectives on how nature itself became a national monument in these places.

This article is an approach to the issue of the coloniality of nature, an issue that today has reached a breaking point in which the conditions of life themselves, especially the access to genetic structures and the political conditions that determine them are being questioned —paradoxically—, as a result of the extraordinary advances in science. A reflection from the aesthetic perspective, as the one shown here, allows us to say that these processes, in which the life of the planet is at stake, cannot be carried out without a discussion in terms of politics, ethics and options of civilization, to be developed in the field of aesthetics and the sensible. ; Este artículo es una aproximación al problema de la colonialidad de la naturaleza, que alcanza en la actualidad un punto límite en el que se ponen en cuestión las condiciones mismas de la vida, paradójicamente, como resultado de los extraordinarios avances de la ciencia, en términos del acceso a las estructuras genéticas y de las condiciones políticas que la determinan. Una reflexión desde una perspectiva estética, como la nuestra, nos permite afirmar que estos procesos en los que se pone en juego la vida en el planeta no pueden darse al margen de una discusión, en términos éticos, políticos y de opciones civilizatorias, que tenga lugar en el campo de lo sensible y las estéticas.

This book explores 'environmental forms' in terms of their relationships to the socio-politico-ecological transformations currently in progress. Today, the environment is a central theme in political discourse, scientific work and everyday life. It is multi-dimensional: it is a living space, a socio-ecological system and a field of research and action. However, despite the presence and diversity of existing approaches, the ways in which policies address environmental issues remain mainly focused on control, highlighting the techno-ecological, managerial and curative dimensions of public action

Why are there so many nature metaphors - clouds, rivers, streams, viruses, and bugs - in the language of the internet? Why do we adorn our screens with exotic images of forests, waterfalls, animals and beaches? In Technobiophilia: Nature and Cyberspace , Sue Thomas interrogates the prevalence online of nature-derived metaphors and imagery and comes to a surprising conclusion. The root of this trend, she believes, lies in biophilia, defined by biologist E.O. Wilson as 'the innate attraction to life and lifelike processes'. In this wide-ranging transdisciplinary study she explores the strong thr