the Philosophy of Nature: Meditations on Beauty and Wisdom Things

Forty things, looked at properly.The sun. A stone. A river. A root. An afternoon in July.Most philosophy begins with a question. The Philosophy of Nature begins with an object, and lets the object set the question. Each of its forty chapters starts with something anyone can go and look at, finds out what it actually is - what the physics and biology now say, which is often stranger and kinder than the folklore - and only then permits a thought about a human life.What follows in every chapter is the best that Western and Eastern thought has already made of that thing: Heraclitus and Zhuangzi on the river, Kant and Su Shi on the moon, Spinoza and the Book of Changes on the seasons. And then one step further, taken here.Among the claims this book makes on its own account: - Cost and depletion are different things. Something can spend itself permanently, every second, and still be nowhere near empty.- Most of the time, when we say gone, the only thing we have actually established is not visible from here.- Interdependence is a fact. Reciprocity is a hope. A network is a topology, not an ethic.- The question is never whether to hold on or to let go. The question is how long the growing season is - and that is a fact about the place, not about you.Twenty-five full-colour plates. A closing index of every proposition the book advances, so you can find any of them again.Written to be read for pleasure: exact, unhurried, and quietly glad.