#naturalism

The race is now on between the technoscientific and scientific forces that are destroying the living environment and those that can be harnessed to save it. . . . If the race is won, humanity can emerge in far better condition than when it entered, and with most of the diversity of life still intact. ↗

— Edward O. Wilson

#climate-change #e-o-wison #earth-changes #ecology #naturalism

Shallow men believe in luck or in circumstance. Strong men believe in cause and effect. ↗

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

#causation #cause-and-effect #chance #darwinism #inspirational

How came the bodies of animals to be contrived with so much art, and for what ends were their several parts? Was the eye contrived without skill in Opticks, and the ear without knowledge of sounds?...and these things being rightly dispatch’d, does it not appear from phænomena that there is a Being incorporeal, living, intelligent...? ↗

— Isaac Newton

#intelligent-design #naturalism #religion-and-science #science #science-and-religion

I believe, said Austerlitz, they know they have lost their way, since if you do not put them out again carefully they will stay where they are, never moving, until the last bath is out of their bodies, and indeed they will remain in the place where they came to grief even after death, held fast by the tiny claws that stiffened in their last agony,until a draft of air detaches them and blows them into a dusty corner. ↗

— W.G. Sebald

#grief #naturalism #death

Modernist discourse [...] incorporates semantic devices - such as the labeling of theism as 'religion' and naturalism as 'science' - that work to prevent a dangerous debate over fundamental assumptions from breaking out in the open. ↗

— Phillip E. Johnson

#modernity #naturalism #naturalism-as-science #presuppositions #science

In the woods is perpetual youth. In the woods we return to faith and reason. ↗

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

#naturalism #nature #nature-writing #faith

But if you do know what is taught by plants and weather, you are in on the gossip and can feel truly at home. The sum of a field's forces [become] what we call very loosely the 'spirit of the place.' To know the spirit of a place is to realize that you are a part of a part and that the whole is made or parts, each of which in a whole. You start with the part you are whole in. ↗

— Gary Snyder

#gossip #naturalism #nature #part #spirit-of-place

My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#realism #writing #nature

Will be but corpses dressed in frocks, who cannot speak to birds or rocks. ↗

— Gary Snyder

#naturalism #poetry #spirituality #nature

Ahistorical commentators who too readily dismiss Nietzsche's interest in physiological questions (e.g., DeMan 1979: 119; Nehamas 1985: 120) miss the centrality of such ways of thinking to Nietzsche's naturalism and to the whole intellectual climate of the period. 'The naturalization of the image of man under the influence of natural science was the work of the materialist movement of the middle of the century' (Schnädelbach 1983: 229). In this regard, Nietzsche was very much a thinker of his times. ↗

— Brian Leiter

#nietzsche #physiology #nature