E. Brady - The Sublime and Environmental Ethics

Conférence | Talk

Emily Brady

(University of Edimburgh)

The Sublime and Environmental Ethics

Since its heyday in the eighteenth century, the natural sublime has largely fallen out of favour. What is the relevance of the natural sublime today? In this talk, I argue for its contemporary home in environmental aesthetics and ethics. As in the past, sublimity functions to identify and characterize the challenging, humbling experiences humans have with the natural environment. The sublime moves us beyond the tranquil, scenic, and cute to pin down a set of ?difficult? natural qualities: towering, dizzying, raging, blasting, disordered, and so on. Aesthetic engagement of this kind, I argue, engenders a distinctive type of aesthetic-moral relationship with the natural world, and one which can potentially feed into environmental ethics.

Friday, March 9th, 2012

3:00pm

University of Ottawa

Simard Hall (165, Waller)

Room 125