Abstract

Philosopher Steven Vogel has defended a compelling social constructivist claim: that post-Cartesian and post-structuralist suspicions force us to develop an environmental philosophy without the concept of nature. The author concedes most of Vogel's arguments while attempting to avoid his conclusion. The author argues that we should jettison the familiar concept of nature, yet we need a suitably modified version to illuminate the shared world that is-in some sense-really independent of us. To show how this is possible, we'll detour through Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics. As Gadamer shows with concepts like "language" and "world," so also with "nature": a sufficiently concrete look at the way that concepts are continually reconstructed can capture the way that words present the world "in itself."

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