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摘要
摘要
In this book Max Oelschlaeger argues that the idea of wilderness has reflected the evolving character of human existence from paleolithic times to the present day. An intellectual history, it draws together evidence from philosophy, anthropology, theology, literature, ecology, cultural geography, and archaeology to provide a scientifically and philosophically informed understanding of humankind's relationship to nature.
评论 (2)
出版社周刊评论
It is the Kantian idea of wilderness--its teleological meaning--that occupies the author here. From the minds of five ``poetic thinkers and thinking poets,'' namely, Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Robinson Jeffers and Gary Snyder, Oelschlaeger, professor of philosophy at the University of North Texas, brings new dimension to such matters as the origin and uses of the natural world. Against a dubious reconstruction of the Paleolithic notion of a sacred, shared wilderness, the author deconstructs the modernists' concepts of wild nature as ``matter in motion.'' The scientific revolution in particular is shown to have widened the fissure in our cultural idea of wilderness, between the idea of nature as our ``magna mater''--an organic model of the cosmos--and modernist models in history, cosmology, philosophy, and even in the author's survey of today's ecology movement (from ``resourcism'' to eco-feminism). Oehlshlaeger is a cautious critic and reluctant prophet; nonetheless his proposed ``postmodern idea of wilderness'' swims against the currents of our intellectual history and invites criticism from members of many disciplines. But Joseph Campbell readers should be able to hear, underneath Oelschlaeger's academic style, the faint heartbeat of an older wilderness mythos in his thesis. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Choice 评论
This history of ideas on the relationship of human society to wild nature surveys the eras from the paleolithic to the postmodern. Chronicling the emergence of the idea of nature as the "Magna Mater," Oelschlaeger's overview highlights the contributions of Bacon, Spinoza, Descartes, and Rousseau to modern views of nature and focuses on the philosophical responses of Thoreau, Muir, and Leopold, the poetical expressions of Jeffers and Snyder, and the romantic rhetoric of the deep ecology movement of Lovelock, the eco-feminists, and environmental radicals. A steady theme is the natural process of evolution and change, of which humankind is a part and in which, as in the thought of the process theologian Samuel Alexander "deity exists in and through time and space, where the body of God is the cosmos of the present, and where deity per se is the nisus or inherent restlessness of time that leads to emergent novelty." Oelschlaeger appreciates but sets aside such central figures as Spinoza and Leibniz, privileging more recent understandings of evolution and the second law of thermodynamics. By sieving the thoughts of such thinkers through a contemporary time warp of assumptions and preoccupations, he weakens the profit that the historical enterprise can yield and tends to oversimplify the richness and rigor of their thought. Beautifully written and richly annotated, the book marshals the philosophical sources and arrays the literature of wilderness appreciation with great sensitivity and joy. Advanced undergraduates and up.-M. J. Goodman, University of Hawaii at Manoa