Overview
Moving between ancient and modern sources, philosophy and theology, and science and popular culture, Sean McGrath offers a genuinely new reflection on what it means to be human in an era of climate change, mass extinction and geoengineering. Engaging with contemporary thinkers in eco-criticism, including Timothy Morton, Bruno Latour and Slavoj iek, McGrath argues for a distinctive role for the human being in the universe: the human being is nature come to full consciousness.McGrath's compelling case for a new Anthropocenic humanism is founded on a reverence for nature, a humanism that is not at the expense of nature, and a naturalism that is not at the expense of the human.
Full Product Details
Author: Sean J. McGrath
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Imprint: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 9781474449267
ISBN 10: 1474449263
Pages: 224
Publication Date: 31 March 2019
Audience:
General/trade
,
General
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
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Reviews
"A genuinely new contribution ...McGrath avoids the real pitfalls into which so much contemporary discourse about the environment fall. Either humans are entirely unexceptional, mere objects in the universe alongside other objects, or they are so distinct as to be utterly unnatural and separate from the rest of nature or Creation. Escaping this false choice, McGrath argues for the recovery of a sense of humans as natural, alongside other natural beings, but possessing a unique responsibility and vocation.-- ""Brian Treanor, Loyola Marymount University"" Sean McGrath brilliantly deploys the resources of apophatic wisdom in response to the acute ecological challenge of our time. He taps the distinct eco-anxiety of contemporary culture while endorsing a radical contemplative attunement to the call of deep nature. A passionate, timely and audacious book.-- ""Richard Kearney, Boston College"" Thinking Nature is ... the outcome of an impressive armament of interconnected research projects and a battery of relevant training, cultivated over a career just beginning to fully bloom. In it, McGrath draws upon a decade of scholarship on Heidegger, another decade of pioneering scholarship on Schelling, a variety of published essays on the German mystics, theosophists, medievals and Renaissance Neo-Hermetics who influenced them, doctorates in philosophy and theology, religious training in the Discalced Carmelite tradition, psychoanalytic training in the Jungian school, and insights gleaned from time spent at the helm of an ENGO called For A New Earth (FANE). Thinking Nature is born of the integration of contemplation and activism.--Chandler D. Rogers, Boston College ""Continental Philosophy Review"""
Author Information
Sean J. McGrath is Full Professor of Philosophy at Memorial University of Newfoundland and a Member of the College of the Royal Society of Canada. McGrath is a specialist in the philosophy of religion and the history of philosophy. He has published and lectured widely in German idealism, phenomenology, ecology, theology, and psychoanalysis.
