HIST 220 Nature: The History of an Idea (Same as Environmental Studies 222) (Not offered 1999-2000)

The environmental policies we promote or tolerate, the environmental ethic that informs or fails to inform our actions, the sensibilities that shape our personal interactions with the natural world, the metaphors to which we instinctively resort in discussing it-all of these, at one remove or another, reflect and in turn help shape the ways in which we characteristically conceive of nature. Such conceptions, varying from culture to culture, have also changed quite dramatically across time. Although the course will attempt some cross-cultural comparison, its primary focus will be on the latter issue and its purpose, then-that of exploring those changing ideas of nature from the ancient Near East, via classical and European Middle Ages and the early-modern era of scientific and industrial revolution, down to the present. Readings will be drawn from such works and authors as the Babylonian Enuma Elish and other creation myths, Plato's Timaeus, Genesis, St. Augustine, Robert Boyle, Pierre Gassendi, Newton, Henry Bergson, R. G. Collingwood, A. N. Whitehead and such other modern or contemporary authors as John Passmore, Carolyn Merchant and Clarence Glacken. Primarily reading and discussion format. Evaluation will be based on contributions to class discussion, two short analytic papers on assigned topics, and a longer research paper on a topic of the student's choosing. Groups B and D

OAKLEY