Environmental Thought and Action: Pre-Modern and Post-Modern

The paper notes certain features of the post-modern debate within geography and in science generally: the crisis of foundationalism and the revision of geographical historiography. It draws parallels between these and aspects of natural philosophy at the opening of the 'modern' period in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. A progressive historiography of geographical science is challenged and the continued significance of analogical and metaphorical understanding, particularly in relation to visual images, is discussed. Specific attention is paid to the uses of mathematics and geometry treated metaphorically, and to the relations between poesis and techne as morally distinct but related modes of human interaction with the natural world. The revival in recent years of many features of late Renaissance scientific debates is examined through the work of some feminist and neo-romantic authors.