28319 Ephron Seminar. "Imagining Nature among the Greeks"?
The goal of this course is to gain an understanding of the historical roots of the concept of nature (Greek physis), while being attentive to the diversity of ancient Greek thought about nature even in its early history. In the texts we will read, numerous notions of “nature” can be discerned: for instance, nature as the physical form of an individual, nature as an underlying reality of someone or something, nature as an autonomous thing distinct from human art and from the supernatural, nature as the all-encompassing natural order, or nature as the natural environment. The conceptual and ideological work done by these conceptions also varies wildly. Furthermore, the images associated with the concepts are similarly diverse, ranging from human bodies to magical plants and cosmic spheres, and with a comparable repertory of conceptual and ideological purposes. Yet discussions of the concept of nature typically deal almost exclusively in abstractions: this is true, for instance, of the standard study of physis written over a century ago as a U of C dissertation, which we will read in excerpt. Throughout this class, we will consider not only the explicit and abstract conceptualization of nature, but also a number of related images—especially in the form of metaphors, analogies and personifications—that ultimately fed into the literary and philosophical depictions of nature in the long traditions that have followed.