(Ryan Shea) Phenomenology of Nature

DEAN's LECTURE SERIES
Ryan Shea, Associate Researcher and Educator at The Nature Institute, will present their lecture,"Phenomenology of Nature."
Edmund Husserl inaugurated the modern discipline of phenomenology with the rallying cry, "back to the 'things themselves'." And yet, when reading the works of phenomenologists, one might reasonably worry that we have bracketed the natural world, that we have left out precisely the "things themselves." This talk pursues two distinct, yet intertwined, questions. We begin with Socrates's central question (ti esti), "What is phenomenology?" This leads to our central concern, "How might we practice a phenomenology of nature?" The work of the poet, scientist, painter, and dramatist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe will serve as a guiding light.