Dalia Nassar (University of Sydney)
May 11, 2023 | 17.45 – 19.15 | Aachener Str. 217, a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School, Skyfall (3rd floor)
This presentation further elaborates the notion of the embodied history of trees, which was developed with plant physiologist Margaret Barbour (2019; 2023), and articulates its conceptual and ethical implications. I begin with an overview of the origins of the idea (and our collaboration) before moving to explicate the meaning of embodied history, showing how trees literally embody their environments – in their structure (morphology), growth patterns, in adjustments they make to tissue allocation and root deployment, and in the ways successive generations are affected by factors in parent environments – and how their environments are, in turn, expressions of the trees. By highlighting the deep reciprocity between trees and their environments, the presentation raises crucial questions about the usual modes of conceptualizing the relation between organism and environment, and points to the ways in which environmental ethics remains largely wedded to these problematic conceptualizations. It concludes by considering how environmental ethical concepts can be extended or transformed in light of the embodied history of trees, noting how these concepts challenge assumptions within mainstream environmental ethics, while supporting the insights of deep ecology, ecofeminism, and Indigenous relational ethics in illuminating ways.
Dalia Nassar is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Sydney. Her research sits at the cross-roads of the history of German philosophy, the history of science, environmental philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics. She is the author of two monographs, Romantic Empiricism: Nature, Art, and Ecology from Herder to Humboldt (OUP 2022) and The Romantic Absolute: Knowing and Being in Early German Romantic Philosophy (Chicago 2014), and editor of a number of books, including, most recently, Women Philosophers in the Long Nineteenth Century: The German Tradition (OUP 2021, with Kristin Gjesdal). She has collaborated with plant physiologist Margaret Barbour and is currently working with geoscientist, Kathryn Fitzsimmons. With Luke Fischer, she co-edited the 2015 issue of the Goethe Yearbook on “Goethe and Environmentalism.” Her work has been translated in Norwegian, German, and Portuguese.