Philosophy and the cult of nature

The course proposes a diachronic process that begins with the pre-Socratics, identifies the central role of the two great pillars of ancient philosophy, Plato and Aristotle, and highlights the problematic role of Nature in the religious tradition of the Old and New Testaments. This first part will also discuss the multi-millennial success of the theory of the four elements as well as a certain “anti-ecologism” common to both Platonic doctrine and Christian teaching. A second itinerary will reconstruct the paradigm shift brought about by Renaissance thought, which offered a mathematical approach to nature; it will present the implications of what is termed natural theology, to finally arrive at the eighteenth century centred on Rousseau and the “return to nature”, and the revolutionary development of an aesthetics of nature. The final part of the course will analyse the nineteenth- and twentieth-century situation, marked primarily by the modern sciences, without neglecting the evolution of contemporary ecologism. also viewed in an ideological or meta-religious perspective.

Architecture, urban planning and the very notion of the project are all at first sight opposed to the concept of Nature. However, architecture (not just organic architecture) and the city (not just the garden city) have attempted to recover a closeness with Nature. This closeness has always been present also in the tradition of mimesis, namely the imitation of nature in works of human invention. In an era marked by a “return to Nature” and an ecologism that takes the most varied forms, a historical-theoretical reconstruction of the term “nature” appears necessary.

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