One of the legacies of modern philosophy is to have separated or bifurcated the human from nature. Marco Altamirano offers a critique of the modern concept of nature in order to chart a new trajectory for the philosophy of nature. -/- By examining the history of the concept of nature, Altamirano shows how a spatial and epistemological concept of nature emerged in Descartes, where a subject confronts an object in space and subsequently wonders about her mode of access to that (...) object. He then argues that a time-based concept of nature is necessary in order to reinstall the subject within its eventual ecology. Deploying conceptual resources from Bergson, Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault, and Leroi- Gourhan (among others), Altamirano shows how the concept of technology harbors an escape route from the spatial and epistemological picture of nature. Ultimately, this book draws the profile of a concept of nature based on time and technology that bypasses the nature-artifice distinction that has mired the philosophy of nature since modern philosophy. (shrink)

The article introduces the basic epistemology of the concept of ›milieu‹ that was so significant for nineteenth-century studies of nature, society, and art: focusing on an object’s environment means to include a formerly »unmarked space« into the realm of observation. This paradoxical crossing of ›inside‹ and ›outside‹ was highly productive for innovative theories of life in philosophy, science, and literature: drawing from George Canguilhem’s reading of Claude Bernard’s concept of the milieu intérieur, the article reads Hegel’s description of the »prose (...) of the world« as an early version of the awareness that reality is not found ›out there‹ but produced by discourses which, as the naturalistic movement at the end of the century shows, also include aesthetic theories. (shrink)