Robert Earle

Christopher Preston’s Tenacious Beasts: Wildlife Recoveries That Change How We Think About Animals is a timely and nuanced assessment of how some key wild animal populations have been faring in these unprecedented recent decades. The book is carefully crafted and engaging and is certain to educate any reader. In particular, any of its major sections would well serve undergraduate or graduate level courses on environmental ethics, or even a section on that topic in a more general philosophy survey. Robert Frodeman offered a vision of philosophers as those who “best serve[ ] society as professional amateurs, helping communities gain a sense of how the parts of our lives fit together. How . . . the truths that science discovers relate to our lived experiences in the world” (Frodeman “A Sense of the Whole,” in Earth Matters 2000, p. 119). Each section of Preston’s book is a stand-alone testament to that vision.

The contemporary interpretation of the history of the aesthetics of nature has been analyzed by Allen Carlson, Ronald Hepburn, Theodor Adorno, and others. According to their interpretation, it has been maintained that pre-Kantian accounts of beauty (taken generally) prioritized natural beauty over art and that Kant was either the last to follow this model or the first to “humanize” aesthetics for reasons pertaining to his ethical system. This interpretation can be called into question via an analysis of the moral and cultural aspects of pre-Kantian and Kantian aesthetics of nature, appealing, in particular, to the works of Lord Shaftesbury, John Dennis, and Joseph Addison. The main focus is on an explication of what this common contemporary interpretation of aesthetic history has to say about contemporary aesthetic theory. The pre-Kantian aesthetics of nature is so radically different from the work of these recent theorists that it is inaccurate to link members from those periods together as allies. Rather, this commonly depicted history of the aesthetic of nature, in which mid-twentieth century figures discuss a “turning away from nature,” is both historically problematic and in keeping with a general twentieth-century nostalgia for an idyllic past.