Nature and Extinction

Moynihan, Thomas

doi:10.1007/978-3-031-27345-2_13

Thomas Moynihan⁴

Part of the book series: Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism ((PHGI))

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Abstract

The natural reality of species extinctions throughout geological time provides challenges for philosophy and human self-understanding. This chapter explores how these realities first became undeniable during the era of German Idealism. Tracing the development of relevant scientific ideas since then, the renewed relevance of extinction for contemporary theory is discussed.

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Notes

1.
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2.
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3.
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4.
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008), 9.
5.
Iain Hamilton Grant, Philosophies of Nature After Schelling (London: Continuum, 2006), 13, 54, 205.
6.
For example, Richard Grusin (ed.), After Extinction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).
7.
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8.
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9.
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10.
William Paley, Natural Theology (London, 1802), 514–15.
11.
For details, see M. J. S. Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in an Age of Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); and J. C. Greene, The Death of Adam: Evolution and its Impact on Western Thought (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1959).
12.
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13.
Georges Buffon, Les époques de la nature (Paris, 1788), 222.
14.
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15.
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16.
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17.
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18.
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19.
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20.
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21.
Ibid., 24.
22.
Kielmeyer, “Relations between Organic Forces,” 47.
23.
Georges Buffon, Histoire naturalle, générale et particulière, vol. 6 (Paris, 1749–1789), 62.
24.
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25.
Ibid., A493/B521.
26.
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28.
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29.
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30.
Schelling, Werke, 2.348–49.
31.
Ibid., 4.489.
32.
Ibid., 11.495–500. My heartfelt thanks to Iain Hamilton Grant for sharing, and allowing me to use, his translation of this lecture.
33.
Heinrich Steffens, Beyträge zur innern Naturgeschichte der Erde, vol. 1 (Freyberg, 1801), 87–88.
34.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Opus Maximum, ed. Thomas McFarland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 292.
35.
Thomas Moynihan, X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered its Own Extinction (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2020), 168–72.
36.
William Whewell, The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (London, 1840).
37.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 5 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957–2002), 6713, 6597.
38.
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39.
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40.
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41.
F. W. J. Schelling, ‘Ages of the World (1813)’, trans. Judith Norman, in The Abyss of Freedom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 121.
42.
Schelling, Ages of the World (1811), 173.
43.
Percy Shelley, Prose Works, vol. 2 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1912), 186.
44.
F. W. J. Schelling, Ages of the World (1815), trans. Jason Wirth (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 3.
45.
Steffens, Beyträge, 96.
46.
Schelling, Ages of the World (1815), 3.
47.
Schelling, Werke, 7.375–79.
48.
C. F. Kielmeyer, “Ideas for a Developmental History of the Earth and its Organisations: Letter to Windschmann, 1804,” in Kielmeyer and the Organic World: Texts and Interpretations, 65–67.
49.
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50.
Alexander Gode-von Aesch, Natural Science in German Romanticism (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 1941).
51.
Schelling, Werke, 3.108.
52.
Lorenz Oken, Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie, vol. 2 (Jena, 1809–1811), 18.
53.
Schelling, Werke, 3.102.
54.
Ibid., 16.
55.
Nicolaas Rupke, “Neither Creation nor Evolution: The Third Way in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Thinking about the Origin of Species,” Annals of the History and Philosophy of Biology vol. 10 (2005): 143–72.
56.
Ibid.
57.
Louis Aggasiz and Augustus Gould, Principles of Zoölogy, vol. 1 (Boston, 1848), 206.
58.
Ibid.
59.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Reflection (London, 1825), 112.
60.
Hugh Miller, The Testimony of the Rocks (Edinburgh, 1857), 215.
61.
Moynihan, X-Risk, 45–126.
62.
Maillet, Telliamed, 225–26.
63.
Immanuel Kant, Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels (Leipzig, 1755), 122.
64.
H. C. Ørsted, The Soul in Nature, trans. L. H. Horner and J. B. Homer (London, 1825), 53–74.
65.
Schelling, Werke, 11.498–99.
66.
Ibid., 10.312. Thanks again to Iain Hamilton Grant for his translation here.
67.
Georges Buffon, Histoire naturelle, générale et particuliére, vol. 31, 527–28.
68.
Schelling, Werke, 11.494.
69.
Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (London, 1844), 164; Robert Owen, On the Nature of Limbs, A Discourse (London, 1849), 83.
70.
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (London, 1859), 344.
71.
Ibid., 489.
72.
Ibid.
73.
Charles Darwin, The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, ed. Frederick Burkhard, vol. 8 (1993), 379.
74.
Stephen Brush, “The Age of the Earth in the Twentieth Century,” Earth Sciences History 8 (1989): 170–82.
75.
See Spencer R. Weart, The Rise of Nuclear Fear (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2012).
76.
Alfred Döblin, Mountains, Oceans, Giants: A Novel of the 27th Century, trans. C. D. Godwin (Cambridge: Galileo, 2021), 344–46.
77.
Ibid., 380.
78.
Ibid., 370–71.
79.
Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History, trans. Michael Bullock (London: Routledge, 1953), 209.
80.
F. W. J. Schelling, Idealism and the Endgame of Theory: Three Essays by F.W.J. Schelling, trans. Thomas Pfau (Albany: SUNY, 1994), 88.
81.
Jaspers, Origin and Goal, 240.
82.
Ibid., 211.
83.
Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. J. H. Nichols (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969), 158–60.
84.
Georges Bataille, The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture, trans. Michelle and Stuart Kendell (New York: Zone, 2005), 87; Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Atheneum, 1974), 472; Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, trans. Quintin Hoare, vol. 2 (London: Verso, 1991), 306.
85.
See Henry H. Bauer, Beyond Velikovsky: The History of a Public Controversy (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984).
86.
Lincoln Barnett, ‘The Pageant of Life’, Life Magazine (7 September, 1953), 74.
87.
John Hodgdon Bradley, ‘The Tribes that Slumber’, in The Century, 117 (1929), 55–58.
88.
Will Cuppy, How To Become Extinct (New York: Dover, 1941), 93.
89.
James Elroy Flecker, The Last Generation: A Story of the Future (London: New Age Press, 1908), 56.
90.
Gordon Dillow, Fire in the Sky: Cosmic Collisions, Killer Asteroids, and the Race to Defend Earth (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020), 129.
91.
David M. Raup, Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck? (New York: Norton, 1992).
92.
Stanisław Lem, One Human Minute, trans. C. S. Leach (London: Mandarin, 1986), 92–96.
93.
Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (London: Vintage, 2000), 320.
94.
Stephen Jay Gould, “Toward the Vindication of Punctuational Change,” in Catastrophes and Earth History, ed. W. A. Berggren and J. A. Van Couvering (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).
95.
Toby Ord, The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).
96.
Brassier, Nihil Unbound, 226–27.
97.
Meillassoux, After Finitude, 112.
98.
Quentin Meillassoux, ‘Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition: A Speculative Analysis of the Sign Devoid of Meaning’, in Genealogies of Speculation: Materialism and Subjectivity Since Structuralism, ed. Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).
99.
Cuvier, Fossil Bones, 184.

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Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK
Thomas Moynihan

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Centre for Theory and Criticism, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada
Tilottama Rajan
Department of Philosophy, Royal Holloway, University of London, London, UK
Daniel Whistler

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Moynihan, T. (2023). Nature and Extinction. In: Rajan, T., Whistler, D. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Poststructuralism. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27345-2_13

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27345-2_13
Published: 02 June 2023
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-27344-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-27345-2
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