Title & Author:

The moral authority of nature / edited by Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal.

Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Description:

vii, 519 pages : illustrations, map ; 24 cm

Notes:
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Introduction : doing what comes naturally / Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal -- Values. -- Measuring authority, authoritative measures : Hesiod's Works and days / Laura M. Slatkin -- Nature in person : medieval and Renaissance allegories and emblems / Katharine Park -- Burning The fable of the bees : the incendiary authority of nature / Danielle Allen -- Attention and the values of nature in the Enlightenment / Lorraine Daston -- The erotic authority of nature : science, art, and the female during Goethe's Italian journey / Robert J. Richards -- Nature and Bildung : pedagogical naturalism in nineteenth-century Germany / Eckhardt Fuchs -- Economics, ecology, and the value of nature / Matt Price -- Necessity and Freedom. -- Trouble in the earthly paradise : the regime of nature in late medieval Christian culture / Joan Cadden -- Nature on trial : acts "against nature" in the law courts of early modern Germany and Switzerland / Helmut Puff -- Onanism, Enlightenment medicine, and the immanent justice of nature / Fernando Vidal -- Ants and the nature of nature in Auguste Forel, Erich Wasmann, and William Morton Wheeler / A.J. Lustig -- "To become as one dead" : nature and the political subject in modern Japan / Julia Adeney Thomas -- Liberation through control in the body politics of U.S. radical feminism / Michelle Murphy -- Boundaries. -- Complexio/complexion : categorizing individual natures, 1250-1600 / Valentin Groebner -- Human experimentation in the eighteenth century : natural boundaries and valid testing / Londa Schiebinger -- Nature and nation in Chinese political thought : the national essence circle in early-twentieth-century China / Fa-ti Fan -- When pollen became poison : a cultural geography of ragweed in America / Gregg Mitman -- Three roots of human recency : molecular anthropology, the refigured Acheulean, and the UNESCO response to Auschwitz / Robert N. Proctor.

Summary:

For thousands of years, people have used nature to justify their political, moral, and social judgments. Such appeals to the moral authority of nature are still very much with us today, as heated debates over genetically modified organisms and human cloning testify. This work offers a wide ranging account of how people have used nature to think about what counts as good, beautiful, just, or valuable. The eighteen essays cover a diverse array of topics, including the connection of cosmic and human orders in ancient Greece, medieval notions of sexual disorder, early modern contexts for categorizing individuals and judging acts as "against nature," race and the origin of humans, ecological economics, and radical feminism. The essays also range widely in time and place, from archaic Greece to early twentieth-century China, medieval Europe to contemporary America. This work provides a sustained historical survey of its topic.

Resources:
Table of contents
Table of contents
Contributor biographical information
Publisher description
Verlagsinformation
Publisher description

ISBN:

0226136809 (alk. paper)
9780226136806 (alk. paper)
0226136817 (pbk. ; alk. paper)
9780226136813 (pbk. ; alk. paper)

Subject:

Philosophy of nature History.
Nature Moral and ethical aspects History.
Philosophy history
Nature
Philosophie de la nature Histoire.
Nature Aspect moral Histoire.
Nature Moral and ethical aspects.
Philosophy of nature.
Naturphilosophie
Ethik

Form/genre:

History.

Added entries:

Daston, Lorraine, 1951-
Vidal, Fernando.

Holdings:

Location: Library main 296867
Call No.: BIB 243185
Status: Available