Forms of Nature: how to draw the line between real nature and manmade copies.

Forms of Nature: how to draw the line between real nature and manmade copies. A talk by Maria Balaska.

This talk responds to an increasing presence of synthetic nature and the consequent blurring of the boundary between what is natural and what is artificial. It investigates whether and how we can still hold a conceptual distinction between real nature and artificial nature, and our experiences of them. Drawing from Aristotle and Heidegger on the Greek concept of phusis, it rejects the idea that nature is reducible to matter -and therefore not essentially different from what is manmade- and puts forward, instead, a dynamic view of nature as informed and intelligible activity. The fact that qua activities beings by nature are comprehensible and intelligible to us while being irreducible to our own purposes creates a special link between nature and the human mind, which is absent in the case of replicas.

Maria Balaska is a research fellow at the philosophy department of Åbo Akademi University, Finland. She works on Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the philosophy of psychoanalysis. Her current research project, funded by the KONE Foundation, investigates the conceptual distinction between real and fake nature. Her latest book is Anxiety and Wonder: on Being Human (Bloomsbury, 2024).