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This chapter reads difference in Aristotle's metaphysics in relation to Irigaray's first essay on his work, “How to conceive (of) a girl?” from Speculum of the Other Woman. It argues that his explicit and well-known subordination of difference to identity is predicated upon a phallocentric cover up. The concepts Aristotle privileges—form, substance, identity, physis—are isomorphically congruent with phallic masculinity, while the concepts he designates as their subordinates—matter, privation, and difference—are entwined with a misogynist figuration of femininity. Yet the privilege of form, identity, and physis is far less secure than he admits. They stand on the repression of an interval, which covertly serves to distinguish Aristotle's phallic conceptual architecture from what Irigaray calls the maternal-feminine.

The conclusion revisits the idea of Castoriadis as problematic of being and creation. In arguing that Castoriadis's understanding of the circle of creation presumes a circle of interpretation, it draws attention to creation as contextual and opens onto inter-cultural questions of autonomy. It emphasizes that even though Castoriadis shifted from an elucidation of a regional ontology of nomos to a trans-regional ontology of creative physis, he did not dissolve the tension between the nomos and physis problematic, but took it in new directions. The phenomenological problematic of the world horizon was generally marginalized in his thought, but in extending his understanding of auto-ontological creation of form into nature, this book has argued that it reappeared at the level of the living being and expanded the phenomenal field as it has been conventionally understood in phenomenology.

If Castoriadis focussed on an elucidation of a regional ontology of nomos at the time of The Imaginary Institution of Society, from the 1980s a shift becomes apparent in his thought, as he grows to appreciate that aspect of physis that he had previously neglected: its auto-creativity. With the aid of archival sources, this chapter reconstructs Castoriadis's ontological shift from a regional ontology of nomos, to a general, or trans-regional ontology of creative physis. His shift to an ontology of creative physis emerges from four interconnected aspects of his thought: a reconsideration of Greek (especially Aristotelian) sources, his rethinking of objective knowledge, his re-evaluation of the living being, and his ventures into philosophical cosmology.

When Harry Berger was writing The Allegorical Temper in the early 1950s, he meant the pun in the title to refer both to the “temper” or attitude attributed to Edmund Spenser at the time and to the way The Faerie Queene tempered or critiqued that temper. Readers encounter turmoil by letting themselves fall through the rabbit hole from the sign/referent surface of discourse into the textual underground, where semiosis is physis and where, within the sign, signifiers and signifieds continuously uncouple, recouple, and proliferate. Once there, the reader shrinks into a tiny figure and the textual underbrush expands to an intemperate tangle of rhizomes. The new organization of life into cyber communities made everything faster and more accessible. It is no substitute for talking and touching face-to-face.

This chapter retraces some of the ways “nature” has both entered and escaped philosophical concern. It proposes a reconstruction of nature as a complex field of meanings, drawing on Heidegger's analysis of the physis/techné dichotomy, its reference to a premodern concept of nature, and its consequences for modern technology. It then focuses on Whitehead's notion of a “bifurcated nature,” which supports and grounds the development of modern science. Finally, the chapter presents Vattimo's concept of “getting over” as an alternative to an overhasty overcoming that risks repressing its own long shadows.

This chapter suggests that an awareness of the weaknesses and errors John Dewey finds in the traditional doctrines is crucial in piecing together the constructive doctrine he propounds. It looks at the objections Dewey has to earlier ontologies, beginning with an analysis about a traditional distinction—that between techne and physis—which is essential to an understanding of Dewey, especially in relation to earlier naturalistic thinkers. The chapter also examines Dewey’s works to elucidate his objections to other theories of form. These will come mostly from Experience and Nature and Art as Experience. Finally, the chapter deals with certain sections of The Quest for Certainty which provide a good link with both the discussions of idealism and its subsequent constructive analyses.

To show that Rousseau proposes a thought of the origin, Lacoue-Labarthe turns to the Second Discourse (“Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality Among Men”). The chapter argues that Rousseau does not limit himself to posing a question of empirical origins, but rather poses a radical and critical question on the relationship between nature and culture, phusis and techne. Man is an animal lacking an essence, an animal in default of animality, a de-natured animal requiring supplemental capacities. This denaturing is understood by Rousseau as grounded in an originary negativity. What Rousseau discovers or invents is the transcendental as negativity, or transcendental negativity. Lacoue-Labarthe refers to this condition as an onto-technology.

Bruce Foltz points out the inadequacy of works like “environment” and “nature” for capturing what Hölderlin calls elsewhere “the wonderfully all-present.” “Nature” and “environment” are shallow and inadequate words that immediately entangle us in problematic dualisms and scientific presuppositions. Heidegger suggested that physis is a more appropriate Leitword (key word), one that facilitates the reenchantment of the world and, indeed, an awakening of the holy.

Nature as modernity conceives it—solid, self-contained and self-subsistent, autonomous in its operations—is pure exteriority, without face and without inner life. This solid opacity makes of nature a mirror for our own approach to it, and thus as Marion as argued, renders nature an idol. For nature to possess an interiority, for it to face us, it must have another side turned away from us, i.e. turned toward a depth from which it arises, and from which it is “given.” Such givenness would not be the mere factuality of empiricism, but something closer to what the Renaissance called natura naturans, or better yet what Heidegger (after the ancient Greeks) calls physis. For environmental philosophy to address these issues, would require a phenomenology of this radical mode of givenness, a Gegebenheit beyond the Husserlian notion, and akin to the Geben from which Heidegger understands his later key concept of Ereignis.

In Ecology without Nature, Timothy Morton breaks with the folksy and somewhat frumpy environmental holism of the ’70s and ’80s, and confirms the growing conviction in continental philosophical circles of a necessary movement beyond phenomenological critiques of calculative science to hypermodern reinscriptions of technological thinking. In this essay, the author argues that Ecology without Nature does not, in fact, challenge the dominant twentieth-century discourse. For Morton, any experience of nature as organic whole, the universe of meaning, can only be the result of a substitution of a psycho-genetically structured totality for the material chaos of the universe. The authors makes a case for questioning Morton’s rejection of “premodern” cosmology and argues for a reconsideration of alternative models of material interdependence. The author discusses one model central to the Renaissance philosophy of nature, hermetic holism, which offers us a strong theory of interdependence but does not implicate us in a posthuman meta-narrative.

In addition to the question, “What is a divine Person?” a doctrine of the Trinity must specify what is the divine “nature” that is shared by the three Persons. It is argued that this question is best understood in terms of a dichotomy: Do the Persons share merely an abstract universal nature, a set of properties that are necessary and sufficient for a Person to be divine? Or do they share an individual, concrete nature, a single “trope” of deity?

This chapter explores Plato’s interaction with Hesiod the language expert in his Cratylus. On a basic level, Plato often invokes Hesiod by quoting from his works in order to lend support to a certain thesis that one of the interlocutors proposes. More importantly, there is a different mode of interaction as well, i.e. the intellectual affinity that may exist between the two authors in matters pertaining to language. From the ensuing discussion, it emerges that both authors show that names and their etymology have some value insofar as they enable us to search for the truth. But knowing a name and its etymology does not enable us to grasp the meaning of the denotatumtout court.

The Introduction discusses “myth” as a category of thought and contrasts modern and ancient Greek views of its meaning and origin. Greek thinkers only occasionally distinguished between myths and the works that contained them. Most ancient critics viewed myths as the creations of the poets Homer and Hesiod, while others believed that they were ancient revelations. Still others thought of myths as beliefs generated by humans in a primitive condition. The interpretation of myths in antiquity changed over time, following changes in philosophical ideas. The classification of myths was a late development, and the typology developed was closely bound to trends in philosophy.

This chapter deals with the earliest attacks on Homer and Hesiod’s poems by the Presocratic philosophers—a diverse collection of thinkers writing c.600–400 B.C.E. They broadly agreed that the teachings about the gods as portrayed by the poets were unacceptable to rational people. The basic grounds for the attacks were that much of what was said about the gods was unbelievable and they were portrayed as engaging in immoral activities. The Presocratics demythologized the poets’ anthropomorphic gods and sought to make them more worthy of human worship. However, their investigations of the natural world and belief in necessity (natural laws) meant that some couldn’t accommodate the gods at all. None of these Presocratics argued that a god created the world; it seemed apparent that the world always existed in some form. Moreover, the gods could not do anything contrary to necessity. The world, entirely made of matter, operated by its own laws.

Diogenes of Sinope is the great exemplar whom later Cynics continually evoke. Yet despite the many vivid anecdotes told of him, he is historically a shadowy figure, and his ideas are difficult to pinpoint with absolute precision. In seeking to locate Diogenes somewhat precisely both in his own time and in the longer durée of Greek ethical thought, “Diogenes of Sinope” first surveys major themes of Cynicism that may be traced back to Diogenes himself: living according to nature, criticism of customs, shamelessness and parrhēsia, ascetic self-sufficiency, cosmopolitanism, and the pursuit of happiness through virtue. While there may be a general consensus on these topics, controversies remain, and perhaps must remain. In its second section, therefore, the chapter explores diverse, even opposite ways in which Diogenes has been construed and categorized. This series of antinomies again highlights the difficulties of precise interpretation, and suggests the deliberately elusive nature of Diogenes’ ethical thinking.

“Ethical and Political Thoughts in Antiphon’s Truth and Concord” argues for a unitarian reading of Antiphon’s treatises Truth and Concord. Three concepts are significant to the discussion: nature (physis), law (nomos), and intelligence (gnōmē, nous). Antiphon’s point of departure is physis, which he does not regard as source of social, that is, interpersonal, or civic normativity. In the face of the absence of nature as a guide to social or civic life, Truth and Concord each entertain two distinct responses to the problem. In Truth Antiphon suggests, in contrast to the convictions of many contemporaries, that nomos is not capable of solving the problems of physis. In Concord, gnomē is presented as providing a criterion for engendering good character and conducting a successful life. Even leaving aside the problem of the identity of the sophist and the oligarchic rhetor, this defense of intelligence, when combined with the attack on nomos, implies an antidemocratic polemic.