Concepts of Nature from Antiquity to the Present

Since Heraclitus' famous aphorism "Nature likes to veil herself", the conception of nature has undergone profound changes: from the powerful and dynamic phusis of Greek philosophy to the vulnerable ecosystem, from playful and unpredictable lascivia to a mechanistic view of nature, from a the Sublime to something ready to be dominated, from a primordeal force to the "second nature" in contenporary technology. The various conceptions of nature - such as Zeno's "artistic fire", "Mother Nature", nature as living organism, nature as a hieroglyphic - problematize at the same the porous boundaries between nature and culture, between nature and art, between the non-human and the human, between nature and technology. We will focus on seminal texts from Antiquity, the Middle Ages, Renaissance Neo-Platonism, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, 20th century ecology and eco-criticism.