Romantic Empiricism Nature, Art, and Ecology from Herder to Humboldt

In Romantic Empiricism, Dalia Nassar distinguishes and explores an understudied philosophical tradition that emerged in Germany in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, traces its development, and argues for its continued significance. Moving from the late Kant's notion of reflecting judgment, to Herder's articulation of the idea of "animal worlds," Goethe's explication of the obligations of the scientist, and Alexander von Humboldt's aesthetic science, Nassar demonstrates how these thinkers developed a sophisticated empirical approach to the natural world, which focuses on the phenomenon while also recognizing the creative role of the knowing subject and the cognitive value of art and aesthetic experience. She explores how these four thinkers worked together-sometimes as rivals, but more often than not as teachers and collaborators-and illustrates how their search for a new methodology culminated in a new, ecological understanding of the world and the human place within it. Revisiting their thought, especially their distinctive approach to the study of nature, Nassar demonstrates, has the potential to redirect contemporary environmental debates and respond to urgent ecological questions in new and productive ways.

Dalia Nassar is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney and a Researcher at the Sydney Environment Institute. Her work sits at the crossroads of the history of German philosophy, environmental philosophy, aesthetics, and ethics. She is the author of The Romantic Absolute: Being and Knowing in German Romantic Philosophy (University of Chicago Press, 2014) and editor of a number of volumes, including, most recently, Women Philosophers in the Long Nineteenth Century: The German Tradition (with Kristin Gjesdal, Oxford University Press, 2021).