Against the growing trend in philosophy toward naturalistic analysis, Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment has gained significant attention. Some scholars suggest that Kant’s insights bear on our aesthetic appreciation of nature, others on our account of the life sciences. In this paper I draw these lines of inquiry together to identify two overlooked dimensions of Kant’s project: the role of moral hope in problematizing the limits of natural science and the role of culture in providing a solution. Kant argues that we cannot think consistently unless we are able to conceive of nature as a domain that is hospitable to human freedom. His response is to identify the productive capacity of the imagination to transform the material of nature into something more. While the prevailing conception of nature today is at best indifferent and at worst antagonistic to human habitation, this dimension of Kant’s work has much to bear on contemporary thought.

In this paper I focus on the analysis of the concept of the physical and its implications for the formulation of physicalism. Most of the paper is “negative,” insofar as it intends to show why the most accepted formulation of physicalism, the theory of the supervenience or complete determination of the empirical phenomena by the microphysical characteristics, has deep empirical and conceptual deficiencies: on one hand, it seems to be incompatible with the results of different sciences and, on the other, it allows us to understand neither the scientific nor the daily use of the notion of the physical. If this is the case, then we have strong reasons for constructing a non-reductive concept of physicalism that describes a world wherein some of its fundamental phenomena can be essentially macrophysical, i.e., physical phenomena which cannot be reduced to, nor understood purely in terms of the properties of their microphysical components.

The epoch of the Anthropocene is on the verge of becoming scientifically acknowledged by the science of Geology. In what way does this concern Philosophy? In this paper, we evaluate how the new concept of the Anthropocene contrasts with the classical concept of Nature, aiming to identify the territory of both. In order to do this we take as our starting point the approach of Francis Bacon (1561-1626) which separates God and Nature. This later translated into the separation of Nature and Culture. The latter dualism is contested by Philippe Descola (b.1942) who defends the convergence of both. Bruno Latour (b.1947) and Timothy Morton (b.1968) consider the concept of nature as obsolete. Ulrich Beck (1944-2015), Erie C. Ellis and Mark Lynas (b.1973) claim that science will be able to cope with whatever changes the Anthropocene brings. We consider that all these claims, albeit apparently contrasting, are grounded in belief and as a counter-proposal we aim to bring to the table the concept of spirituality as essential to re-evaluate what Nature is today in the light of the Anthropocene.

Until Speculative Realism’s arrival a few years back, few philosophers found it problematic to view nature as a cultural construct, circumscribed and dependent on human attitudes (Berleant, 1992: 53). While I share speculative realists’ goal to strengthen philosophy’s mind-independence (Immanuel Kant’s goal as well), I worry that isolating nature as beyond human minds not only absolves human responsibility, but eradicates “kinship” relations, which capture non-hu­man nature providing for and sustaining human beings, and vice versa. To develop an environmental philosophy that affords mind-independence and offers evidence, unlike Positive Aesthetics, which idealizes wilderness, I discuss: 1) the pro/cons of nature’s mind-independence, 2) the implications for aspection, 3) the need for assessment tools that guide human action, 4) the reasons for grounding ethical action in kinship, and 5) recent research that suggests biodiverse cities exemplify the kinship model. Inseparable from nature, human beings are kindred participants in shared eco-systems.

John McDowell gave an important contribution to the debate on naturalism in the contemporary philosophy by proposing a “naturalism of the second nature”, which distinguishes itself by setting aside the conception of nature promoted by the modern science and for being based on the idea of second nature, reinterpreted in the light of the Sellarsian notion of the “logical space of reasons”, understood as the horizon of our world experience. He argues, accordingly, for the unboundedness of the conceptual sphere, which allows him to claim, in Mind and World, that experience justifies our beliefs because it is already conceptually articulated. The naturalism of the second nature extends to the domain of moral philosophy, gaining the form of a virtue ethics. The article points out some of the main problems of McDowell’s naturalism, like the difficulties underlying the experience conceptualism and the charge of idealism, offering also answers, inspired by McDowell himself, to these problems.

Avid critic of the knowledge dependent of the old masters, Francisco Sanches strikes a direct blow at the heart of Aristotelic philosophy with the aim of demystifying the author par excellence of Scholasticism. Francisco Sanches, in this context, attempts to show that the human mind, for as sharp as it may be, is always fallible. In fact, shadows of truth show themselves if we search carefully. The whole history of philosophy proves this assertion, or had it not been more than a history of what was humanly capable of investigating. Some authors, possibly the most distinguishable, transcended the humanly capable of other authors, being therefore, unfortunately, treated as masters of knowing. Unfortunately indeed, as this dogmatic acceptance stagnates knowledge. Francisco Sanches visits exactly the classic masters of knowledge, and humbly shows the fallibility of the sapient assertions of Aristoteles.

In this paper, my aim was to analyze the Kantian judgment of taste, by explaining its particular features and how they differentiate it from “good” and “agreeable”, and also I tried to explain its foundations. Besides this topic, I approached the question of aesthetic experience, by trying to understand how it takes place, who are its participants, and what possible relation is between them. At the end, I tried to present an interpretation of the conclusions drawn over the essay.

It is a puzzling fact that the Greek term for Nature ‘physis’ could be used to refer to (inter alia) i) reality as a whole, ii) the nature (essence) of something, iii) to individual material beings or materiality and iv) all things that are self-generating. In order to understand and tie together this wide array of possible meanings, I will consider the thesis that ‘physis’ was in fact used as a concept of being, a term naming the fundamental property of all of reality in the early pre-Socratics, poets and scientists before 500 BCE. Investigating ‘physis’ in this way can give us a way of thinking about Nature as a dynamic and creative but material process that goes far beyond the classical understanding of Nature as the sum of things that self-generate or the modern mathematical understanding of Nature born with Galileo, dominant to this day.

The work realized by Aristotle in his investigations on the natural world, in particular the biological world, has as backdrop two theoretical assumptions: the ability to organize phainomena in such a dialectically well structured, although at the same time open and flexible way, as the living reality that is studied, and the opportunity to offer to the theoretical knowledge, of axiomatic nature, not only information and tools for the understanding of individual species, but also methods, and its logic, which, if properly pursued, will lead to scientific knowledge. This, understood in the sense of causal knowledge, cannot be pursued in a purely formal way. Our aim is to demonstrate why Naturphilosophen did not get the Aristotelian lesson, up to refuse his teleologism because considered metaphysically regressive.

In the Lectures on the Method of Academic Study in 1802, F.W.J. Schelling warned his listeners against the annihilation of nature. The annihilation he had in mind was not ecological in the usual sense of the word, but an annihilation caused by a certain way of looking at nature – a philosophical annihilation. The issue Schelling had in mind was that of understanding nature as mechanical, or as merely a domain of things, and of understanding humans as somehow more than natural. This paper is set to describe and argue for a Schellingian alternative to the “annihilation” of nature, to demonstrate why, on such an understanding of nature, the only thing which could undermine it is abstraction and to see how a philosophy should approach abstract thinking in order to deal with this apparent problem. For that, different ways to apply the “knife” of abstraction will be then discussed – some murderous, some surgical.