Romantic Empiricism

Dalia Nassar is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney and a Researcher at the Sydney Environment Institute. Her work sits at the crossroads of the history of German philosophy, environmental philosophy, aesthetics, and ethics. She is the author of The Romantic Absolute: Being and Knowing in German Romantic Philosophy (University of Chicago Press, 2014) and editor of a number of volumes, including, most recently, Women Philosophers in the Long Nineteenth Century: The German Tradition (with Kristin Gjesdal, Oxford University Press, 2021).

• Introduction Chapter 1: Setting the Stage: Kant and the Critique of the Power of JudgmentChapter 2: The Hermeneutics of Nature: Herder on Animal and Human WorldsChapter 3: The Science of Describing: Herder, Goethe and the HauptformChapter 4: Aesthetic Education and the Transformation of the ScientistChapter 5: Intuitive Judgment and Goethe's Ethics of KnowledgeChapter 6: Organism and Environment: The Aesthetic Foundations of Humboldt's Ecological InsightChapter 7: Embodied Cognition: Humboldt and the Art of ScienceConclusion: The Relevance of Romantic Empiricism

A sea change is taking place in the understanding of German Romantic science, and Nassar's study adds significantly to that impulse. She traces the line that originates in Herder's controversial relation with Kant and flows into Goethe and Alexander von Humboldt, giving it a provocative name: Romantic empiricism. Moreover, she highlights the contemporary importance of this line for new ideas in environmentalism and the practice of natural science. All of this I find both cogent and propitious.