WEEK 8
14 March 11am-12.30pm (Seminar in the Gibson Building)
Dr Katherine Snow, Princeton University.
11am Seminar: ‘Our Inevitable Third Spinoza Controversy’
Abstract: Ontologies of necessity and environmental nihilism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) looks at the lasting legacy of the monistic naturalism developed by early German romantic philosophers of nature in the atmosphere of crisis and contradiction brought on by the Spinoza Controversy. The work looks at a return of the Spinoza Controversy in interwar Europe, and discusses how even though the original Controversy's focus and main terms were philosophical, and the second's were theological, the question of how we see and treat the real natural world was a crucial part of what was at stake both times. The book further argues that the Controversy has now returned for its third iteration, an iteration which must focus explicitly on the "environmental" question rather than beginning with the terms of philosophy or theology alone. Proposing that the removal of all moral value from the natural world was part of the consequences of the West twice choosing the monistic romantic side of the debate, the book argues for the fundamental continuing soundness and relevance of Jacobi's arguments linking rationally constructed cosmologies with nihilism, and seeks to expand upon them.
Dr Katherine Snow received her PhD in 2021 from Edinburgh. Her thesis examined early German romantic monistic approaches to nature and their rebirth (in a new form) in contemporary big bang cosmology and its panentheistic enthusiasts (such as Swimme or T. Berry). Prior to her PhD work she worked in the US government in the Department of State and other agencies, in Washington DC and abroad. Her research since completing the PhD, at Max Planck Institute in Freiburg, New College in Florida, and now Princeton University, has focused on extending her thesis research into new realms of the philosophy of nature and philosophy of science, and also on developing the new (2017) concept of environmental realism as a framework for understanding (and highlighting the problems with) human societies' ongoing total consumption and anthropogenic conversion of the natural world.
