Elemental Philosophy: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water as Environmental Ideas

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments Martin Heidegger once remarked that “one’s last thought should be a thank,” playing on the related German verbs denken (to think) and danken (to thank). Although his intriguing idea suggests the possibility of appending an appreciative after-thought to the book, I follow the more customary approach of commencing rather than closing on a note of gratitude, if only for the concern that my acknowledgments might be lost in a forest of footnotes. Thanks and thoughts are owed to many individuals who helped to shepherd this work along both directly and indirectly. At Penn State University, I would like to thank George Franz, Sophia Wisniewska, Paul DeGategno, Sandy Gleason, Priscilla Clement, Molly Wertheimer, Phyllis Cole, Jeanette Reick, and Gail Wray as well as other academic colleagues—especially Arnold Markley, Pat Hillen, and Adam Sorkin—for their institutional and personal support. Research Development Grants from Penn State in 2004 and 2005 were very beneficial to me in completing the book. Thanks also go to the campus Writing Center and to librarian Sara Whilden and her reliable staff for cheerfully tracking down books and articles as I requested them. At Oberlin College, David Orr provided a collegial, innovative, and goodhumored setting in which to teach and write for two years, and an extended group of Environmental Studies faculty and staff there made my stay a pleasant one, including Harlan Wilson, Scott McMillan, John Petersen, Audra Abt, and Tom Newlin. While I served as a visiting scholar at Emerson College and subsequent to that time, David Spanagel offered a thoughtful and sympathetic sounding board for my ideas. Edward Casey and Peter Manchester, both at Stony Brook University, read much earlier drafts of the manuscript and gave me constructive comments and criticisms. Andreas Michel and Mike Kukral at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology also contributed to my thinking through conversations. At SUNY Press, special thanks goes to Jane Bunker for her patience and diligence in seeing through this work to its completion. I wish to acknowledge in particular the reviewers who shared helpful comments on the writing at a critical stage and to extend gratitude to the Series Editors, J. Baird Callicott and John van Buren, for embracing the project. In Germany, I thank Michael Dusche along with Klaus Held, who unknowingly facilitated the birth of this book in a graduate seminar on the Presocratics. Igor Jasinski, Christina Burris, Elena Figueroa, Natasha xv Piletich, Deb Vetter, Barbara Zanelli, Liza Monroy, China Adams, Lauren Brown, Linda Weintraub, Doug Macauley, and Michele Dixon offered cheerful support and encouragement with the project, and discussions with Chris Hallman, Eliot Tretter, Gary Backhaus, Jhan Hochman, John Scott, Nicky Dyal, Eric Orts, Christy Schneider, Luke Fischer, and Mike Hill were all valuable to me. Emily Helms, who served as my undergraduate research assistant one semester, was also very helpful in locating texts and providing thoughtful feedback, while dialogues I had with Alex Lampros during an independent study I conducted on Being and Time forced me to clarify some of my views of Heidegger. Great thanks are due as well to my friend Shaila George for her artwork and design of the back cover illustration. Place is a theme throughout this work, and a host of cafés in Oberlin, Philadelphia, New York City, Boston, and Bloomington, Indiana provided warm or, alternatively, cool, well-lit environments in which to tap away on my laptop. Thanks in particular goes to the Greenline Coffee House in West Philadelphia (where I ran a biweekly Philosophy Café) for its pleasant staff, fine coffee, and vegetarian fare. The good-spirited instructors at Wake Up Yoga and Studio 34 Yoga kept me attuned to the ever-important roles of breath and air as I labored through final revisions to the book. And I should not forget the contributions of several non-human companions, especially two Siamese cats (Yeti and Dante) and two black cats (Griffin and Nemo), who kept me company during the course of the writing. Portions of this work were presented to the Society for Philosophy and Geography; the International Association for Environmental Philosophy; the International Association for the Study of Environment, Space and Place; and the Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research. Parts of Chapters three, five, six, and seven have appeared, respectively, in an earlier or abbreviated form in scholarly journals: “The Flowering of Environmental Roots and the Four Elements: From Empedocles to Deleuze and Guattari,” Worldviews: Environment, Culture, Religion 9, 3 (2005), pp. 281–314 (permission Koninklijke Brill N...