Nature and Society in Historical Context

In general terms, one way of describing the world we live in is to say that it is made up of nature and society, and that human beings belong to both. This was the first volume to be published which addresses the historical contexts of the relations between these two characteristics of human nature. A distinguished international team aims to contribute - through selective, interdisciplinary studies - to a much-needed but currently scant debate over the reciprocal links between conceptions of nature and conceptions of society from the ancient Greek kosmos to late twentieth-century 'ecology'. Individual essays and the general conclusions of the volume are important not only for our understanding of the evolution of knowledge of nature and of society, but also for an awareness of the types of truth and perception produced in the process.

Introduction; 1. Knowledge of nature and society Ernest Gellner; 2. Two conceptions of the world in Greek and Roman thought Jan Janko; 3. Byzantine fools: the link between nature and society Lenos Mavrommatis; 4. The 'chaotic spaces' of medieval madness: thoughts on the English and Welsh experience Chris Philo; 5. On the perception of nature in Renaissance society Gerhard Jaritz and Verena Winiwarter; 6. Fables of the bees: a case-study on views of nature and society Peter Burke; 7. The earth's fertility as a social fact in early modern England Simon Schaffer; 8. The island and history of environmentalism: the case of St. Vincent Richard Grove; 9. Art and nature in pre-classical economics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Lars Herlitz; 10. The urban and the rustic in Enlightenment London Roy Porter; 11. Science, society and culture in the Romantic naturforschung around 1800 Dietrich von Engelhardt; 12. The anti-Romantic Romantics: nature, knowledge, and identity in nineteenth-century Norway Nina Witoszek; 13. The wordy worship of nature and the tacit feeling for nature in the history of German forestry Joachim Radaku; 14. 'Let us begin with the weather': climate, race and cultural distinctiveness in the American south Mart A. Stewart; 15. Wild West imagery and landscape perception in nineteenth-century USA Gerhard Strohmeier; 16. On human nature: Darwin and the anthropologists Adam Kuper; 17. The siren of evolutionary ethics: Darwin to Wilson Paul Farber; 18. Mapping the human genome in the light of history Mikulas Teich; 19. The way the world is going: the society-nature dichotomy in development rhetorics Bengt-Erik Borgström; 20. Nature and economy Bo Gustafsson; 21. The nature of morality and the morality of nature: problems of normative natural philosophy Kurt Bayerz.

In general terms, one way of describing the world we live in is to say that it is made up of nature and society, and that human beings belong to both. This was the first volume to be published which addresses the historical contexts of the relations between these two characteristics of human nature.