The Noetics of Nature

Bruce Foltz is Professor of Philosophy at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida, and Founding President of the International Association for Environmental Philosophy. He is the author of Inhabiting the Earth: Heidegger, Environmental Ethics, and the Metaphysics of Nature (Humanities Press)
and The Noetics of Nature: Environmental Philosophy and the Holy Beauty of the Visible (Fordham University Press), as well as coeditor of Toward an Ecology of Transfiguration: Orthodox Christian Perspectives on Environment, Nature, and Creation (Fordham University Press). He is finishing a new monograph to be called Nature and Other Modern Idolatries.

“Bruce Foltz’s book The Noetics of Nature: Environmental Philosophy and the Holy Beauty of the Visible is a tour de force, an intellectual and cultural history of nature in the West. Its original and in-depth scholarship re-centers environmental philosophy on the marginalized but crucial intersection of Hebrew and Greek thought in the West, viewed with continuity through the patristic and Byzantine eras and beyond into modern Russian philosophy, as an alternative to modern Western materialism.”---—Alfred Siewers, Bucknell University

“This splendid book makes an original and important contribution to environmental philosophy. It develops an argument the seeds for which were sown by the author’s earlier work: that a fruitful approach to environmental ethics, or a proper understanding of 'the Good' with respect to nature, requires a deeper grounding in environmental aesthetics, or a clearer vision of 'the Beautiful,' which is itself ultimately rooted in an 'environmental theology.' With grace and conviction, Foltz shows that it is only by cultivating a sense of 'the Holy' that we can hope to restore a right relation to nature and to ourselves."---—Christopher Dustin, College of the Holy Cross