Abstract

This diissertation investigates Aristotle's concept of nature. It follows Martin Heidegger's critique of technological thinking and the influence his works have in environmental ethics. As Bruce V. Foltz argues in Inhabiting the Earth, his study of "Heidegger, environmental ethics and the metaphysics of nature," the "positive terminus" of Heidegger's critique of nature lies in the forgotten Greek understanding of nature as phusis, or self-emergence. In the introduction, I summarize this critique and Heidegger's contributions to environmental ethics. In the following chapters, I extend this terminus by examining Aristotle's treatment of nature in the Physics and Metaphysics. ;In chapter 1, I turn to Heidegger's lectures on Aristotle's Physics to focus on nature's self-emergence. Following Heidegger, I argue that Aristotle conceives nature without imposing anthropocentric models of artistic production. This leads to a discussion of themes such as language, form, causality, chance, and teleology. Moving beyond Heidegger, I argue that Aristotle's teleological understanding of natural production reveals nature as a source of intrinsic good. ;But Aristotle's Physics does not present the whole of his concept of nature. Although his physical theory presents new possibilities for ecological thinking, his hierarchical treatment of nature in the Metaphysics and beyond--especially things that are "by nature"--presents important and uncomfortable limits. In these places, Aristotle diminishes the fecund sense of production found in the Physics, when he concludes that form at the species-level is just as much a substance as a singular being is. This generates questions about the status and good of individual beings, a difficulty I link to attempts in ecology to expand our understanding of nature's intrinsic good. ;Such difficulties are necessary interruptions to a wholesale appropriation of Aristotelian philosophy to questions of nature and environmental ethics. In the final chapter, I explore the difficulties of such appropriations and reaffirm the need for critically examining models that subject nature to human measures of truth and value. In conclusion, I make provisional links between Aristotle's understanding of self-emergence and Heidegger's attempts at providing a post-technological way of relating to the natural world, which he calls "dwelling."