freya mathews
When, as an
undergraduate student at the University of London in the early 1970s, I
first discovered the 17th century philosopher, Benedict de Spinoza, I
knew that metaphysics was my vocation. An understanding of the
fundamental nature of reality was key, it seemed to me, to
understanding who and what we as humans are and how we should live in
and with our world. There followed years of postgraduate study in
physics and cosmology in London and a doctoral thesis on the
metaphysics of possibility, necessity and actuality. I realized that
our Western civilization was premised on a limited and instrumental
understanding of the nature of reality and that this defective premise
was showing up – in the late 70s, early 80s - in an environmental
crisis. I had no doubt that if Spinoza had been alive in our time he
would have been an environmental philosopher, so this is what I became.
My first book, The Ecological Self (1991), was, as far as I am aware,
the first treatise on ecological metaphysics to appear in our present
era of environmental concern.
My subsequent work touched on many aspects of ecological thought – ecological ethics, ecological politics (Democracy and Ecology, 1996), ecological psychology and epistemology (For Love of Matter: a Contemporary Panpsychism, 2003), philosophy of place and reinhabitation (Reinhabiting Reality: towards a Recovery of Culture, 2005) – but always wove itself around the central theme of revisioning reality as something alive, imbued with mental as well as material attributes, as something structured by inner meanings of its own with which we can, if we choose, creatively engage. Such engagement can become a core generator of culture, but to achieve it we need, not merely new theorizations of reality such as science might provide, but deep cognitive practices that hone our faculties of intuition and poetic perception and responsiveness. For these I have looked mainly to non-Western traditions, particularly the indigenous traditions of Australia and China. My understanding of metaphysics has expanded under the influence of these traditions to encompass such practices, and the learning- and community-contexts that are crucial to cultivating them. I look forward to our coming full historical circle, as a culture, and recovering an ancient notion of philosophia as a way of life and set of “spiritual exercises”, as Pierre Hadot has put it, conducted in colonies of friends (such as the Ecological Humanities Group) in constant mindfulness of the larger context of nature. It is my belief that philosophia in this expanded sense must form a central element of any new culture of sustainability.
Recent Selected Publications (post 2000)
Books
Articles in Books and Academic Journals
Reprints
Journals
My subsequent work touched on many aspects of ecological thought – ecological ethics, ecological politics (Democracy and Ecology, 1996), ecological psychology and epistemology (For Love of Matter: a Contemporary Panpsychism, 2003), philosophy of place and reinhabitation (Reinhabiting Reality: towards a Recovery of Culture, 2005) – but always wove itself around the central theme of revisioning reality as something alive, imbued with mental as well as material attributes, as something structured by inner meanings of its own with which we can, if we choose, creatively engage. Such engagement can become a core generator of culture, but to achieve it we need, not merely new theorizations of reality such as science might provide, but deep cognitive practices that hone our faculties of intuition and poetic perception and responsiveness. For these I have looked mainly to non-Western traditions, particularly the indigenous traditions of Australia and China. My understanding of metaphysics has expanded under the influence of these traditions to encompass such practices, and the learning- and community-contexts that are crucial to cultivating them. I look forward to our coming full historical circle, as a culture, and recovering an ancient notion of philosophia as a way of life and set of “spiritual exercises”, as Pierre Hadot has put it, conducted in colonies of friends (such as the Ecological Humanities Group) in constant mindfulness of the larger context of nature. It is my belief that philosophia in this expanded sense must form a central element of any new culture of sustainability.
Recent Selected Publications (post 2000)
Books
- Reinhabiting Reality: towards a Recovery of Culture, SUNY (State University of New York) Press, Albany, 2005; also published by UNSW Press, Sydney, 2005
- For Love of Matter: towards a Contemporary Panpsychism, SUNY Press, Albany, 2003
- Journey to the Source of the Merri, Ginninderra Press, Canberra, May 2003
Articles in Books and Academic Journals
- “Why has the West Failed to Embrace Panpsychism?” in David Skrbina (ed), Mind That Abides, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2008 forthcoming
- “The Cypress and the Rose”, The Trumpeter 24. 2, 2008
- “Metaphysics: a Once and Future Discourse”, Dialogue 27, 2, 2008
- “Vale Val: in Memory of Val Plumwood”, Environmental Values 17, 2008
- “Tea for Two at Birrabimurra”, The Trumpeter 24, 1, 2008
- “Thinking from within the Calyx of Nature”, Environmental Values, 17, 1, 2008
- “The Poetic Structure of Being: an Invitation to Ontopoetics”, Australian Humanities Review 43, Dec 2007
- “’Without Animals Life Is Not Worth Living’”, Between the Species VII, August 2007 (online)
- “The World Hidden Within the World: a Conversation on Ontopoetics”, The Trumpeter 23, 1, 2007
- “Beyond Modernity and Tradition: towards a Third Way for Development”, Nanjing Forestry University Journal, July 2006, (translated into Chinese by Li Ling)
- “Beyond Modernity and Tradition: towards a Third Way for Development” also published in Ethics and the Environment 11 (2), 2006
- “Urban Reinhabitation: CERES as Case Study” in Bron Taylor and Jeffrey Kaplan (eds), Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, Continuum International, London, 2005
- “Beyond a Materialist Environmentalism”, Nanjing Forestry University Journal 2, 5, 2005 (translated into Chinese by Guo Hui)
- “Letting the World Do the Doing”, Australian Humanities Review 33, 2004 (electronic)
- “Land Metaphysics”, Dialogue 23, 1, 2004, pp 11-17
- Editorial, PAN (Philosophy Activism Nature), 2, 2002
- 'CERES: Singing Up the City', PAN (Philosophy Activism Nature), no 1, 2000 pp 5-15
- “Deep Ecology”, in Dale Jamieson (ed), Companion to Environmental Philosophy, Blackwell, Oxford, 2000, pp 218-233
Reprints
- Reprint of 'Conservation and Self-Realization: A Deep Ecology Perspective' from Environmental Ethics (1988) in J. Baird Callicott and Clare Palmer (eds), Environmental Philosophy: Critical Concepts in the Environment, Routledge, London and New York, 2004
- Reprint of extract from The Ecological Self in Louis Pojman (ed), Environmental Ethics, Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham MD, 2003 and subsequent editions
- Reprints of 'Letting the World Grow Old: an Ethos of Countermodernity', Worldviews 3, 2, 1999 in David Schmidtz and Elizabeth Willott (eds), Environmental Ethics: Classic and Contemporary Readings, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002 and in J. Baird Callicott and Clare Palmer (eds), Environmental Philosophy: Critical Concepts in the Environment, Routledge, London and New York, 2004
- Reprint of extracts from ‘Living with Animals’, Animal Issues, vol I, no I, 1997 in Susan Armstrong and Richard Boltzler (eds), The Animal Ethics Reader, Routledge, London and New York, 2003
- Reprint of ‘Becoming Native to the City’, Blind Donkey : Journal of the Diamond Sangha, vol 18, no 1,1998 in John Cameron (ed), Changing Places: Reimagining Australia, Longueville, Double Bay NSW, 2003
Journals
- I co-edit the Australian journal, PAN Philosophy Activism Nature with Kate Rigby and Sharron Pfueller, and I am on the Advisory Boards of Environmental Ethics, Worldviews and the Trumpeter.
- A full bibliography, and the full text of a selection of articles, is available at my web site: www.freyamathews.com.
