In nature and “Against Nature”—including some photographs from the Cambridge University Botanic Gardens

This morning I read through Lorraine Daston’s masterful and “pithy work of philosophical anthropology that explores why humans find moral orders in natural orders.”  Speaking personally, I’d highly recommend getting hold of a copy and, to help you make up your mind, I paste below the publisher’s summary of the book.

Her insightful and helpful questions and thoughts helped shape my own philosophical reflections all afternoon, not least of all whilst I walked around the peaceful and beautiful Cambridge University Botanic Garden with my camera in hand.

As always, I hope you enjoy the photographs (just click on them to enlarge) all of which were taken with a Fuji Film X100F and are just as they came out of the camera (with only some occasional, minor cropping).

Against Nature by Lorraine Daston

Summary

Why have human beings, in many different cultures and epochs, looked to nature as a source of norms for human behavior? From ancient India and ancient Greece, medieval France and Enlightenment America, up to the latest controversies over gay marriage and cloning, natural orders have been enlisted to illustrate and buttress moral orders. Revolutionaries and reactionaries alike have appealed to nature to shore up their causes. No amount of philosophical argument or political critique deters the persistent and pervasive temptation to conflate the “is” of natural orders with the “ought” of moral orders.

In this short, pithy work of philosophical anthropology, Lorraine Daston asks why we continually seek moral orders in natural orders, despite so much good counsel to the contrary. She outlines three specific forms of natural order in the Western philosophical tradition—specific natures, local natures, and universal natural laws—and describes how each of these three natural orders has been used to define and oppose a distinctive form of the unnatural. She argues that each of these forms of the unnatural triggers equally distinctive emotions: horror, terror, and wonder.

Daston proposes that human reason practiced in human bodies should command the attention of philosophers, who have traditionally yearned for a transcendent reason, valid for all species, all epochs, even all planets.

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