Thinking Nature

Sean J. McGrath is Professor of Philosophy and Theology at Memorial University of Newfoundland and a Member of the College of the Royal Society of Canada. He is the author of The Philosophical Foundations of the Late Schelling: The Turn to the Positive (EUP, 2021), Thinking Nature. An Essay in Negative Ecology (EUP, 2019), The Dark Ground of Spirit: Schelling and the Unconscious(Routledge, 2012), Heidegger. A Very Critical Introduction (William B. Eerdmans, 2008) and The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy (Catholic University of America Press, 2006). He is editor of The Palgrave Macmillan Handbook to Schelling (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2020), Rethinking German Idealism (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2016) and A Companion to Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Religious Life (Rodopi, 2010).

• Preface; 1. Religion is not only the problem, but the solution; 2. Nature is a symbol, but of what?; 3.The theology of disenchantment; 4. Eco-anxiety; 5. Dark ecology; 6. The human difference; 7. What’s really wrong with Heidegger; 8. Negative ecology; 9. The road not taken; 10. Contemplative politics; 11. Anthropocenic nature; Bibliography.

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.