Ancient Greek philosophy has often been dismissed as irrelevant to contemporary environmental thought or part of the problem in environmental terms because of its apparent dualism and anthropocentrism; Plato is often seen as emblematic of this philosophical stance. Following the research of Timothy Mahoney, this chapter calls into question this characterisation of Plato’s philosophy. Additionally, it examines the environmental perspectives of several philosophers within the later Platonic tradition, whose philosophy was closely connected with ancient Mediterranean religions and has been largely marginalised and excluded from the canon of western philosophy. This chapter argues that there is an important strand in ancient philosophy which is participatory, relational and ecocentric, depicting the philosopher as rooted in place and landscape, and necessitating the philosopher’s recognition of the interconnectedness and sacredness of the natural world and the kinship and ensouled nature of all beings and natural entities. As such, this chapter suggests that ecocentric environmental perspectives can be discerned within Platonism (especially within late antique theurgy) and that, consequently, this strand of ancient philosophy has a great deal to offer to environmental ethics and contemporary environmental thinking on nature and the natural world.

Can we make sense of the idea that nature imposes certain limits on our activities? Seemingly not if we accept the disenchanted conception of nature that goes hand in hand with scientific naturalism, for it is typical of such a picture that the only source of value is to be found in our desires or utilities, and that it makes no sense to suppose that our activities could be normatively constrained from without – as would be the case if there were an external source of value. My aim in what follows is to explore the possibility of defending this realist picture without inviting the charge that we have succumbed to a speculative metaphysics. To put in the terms presupposed by the typical naturalistic philosopher, the question is whether we can make sense of the idea that nature imposes certain limits on our activities without endorsing supernaturalism. The terms ‘naturalism’ and ‘supernaturalism’ tend to be treated as antonyms, but they have various significations and one of my tasks will be to disambiguate them, to agree with the naturalist that supernaturalism can be suspect, but deny that it follows from this that there is no external source of value, nor that we must be atheists, nor even that the term ‘supernaturalism’ should be dispensed with.

This chapter surveys the major developments in the economic history of the Greek world in the classical period (479–323 BCE). While agricultural practices and productive capacities did not change dramatically, this was a period characterized by a massive increase in the demand for certain commodities, especially timber for the ship-building and monumental-construction efforts of the period and grain to meet the dietary needs of a growing human population. It also considers the major developments in the supply and circulation of coinage in the classical period and the emergence of private banking and the expansion of credit, all of which facilitated both local and long-distance trade. As trade intensified throughout the Aegean and poleis developed more sophisticated institutions for local governance, they developed strategies to derive revenue from trade and imposed regulations on both the production and trade of commodities in which they had a special interest.

This examination begins with the poetical exploration of human alienation from nature. It then examines the resilient capacity of aesthetics, particularly aesthetic realism, to disrupt and critique the anthropocentrism that is the cause of this alienation. Aesthetic realism is elaborated through three central, recurrent and evolving concepts: methexis, mimesis and poesis. Taken together, these articulate and enact a relationship between humans and nature that recognises nature’s own inherent meaning and value apart from those imposed upon it by human minds. These dimensions of aesthetic realism are explored through poetry, painting, music and architecture, each in its own way challenging anthropocentrism. In doing so, aesthetics presents itself as a resource for overcoming the disconnection from nature that is essential to addressing the environmental crisis.

Over the last twenty years, New Institutional Economics (NIE) has been a highly influential model in the study of the Greek and Roman economy. Although both its assumptions and methods are controversial, NIE approaches have changed the agenda of ancient economic history. The overall goal of neo-institutional economic history is to explain economic development, and notably growth, in line with a much-quoted phrase by the Nobel-prize winning economist Douglass North, that it is the task of economic history to explain the structure and performance of economies through time. NIE approaches and methods have therefore stimulated quite specific research directions in ancient economic history. This chapter suggests that NIE offers a fruitful conceptual matrix for asking new questions – with or without the answers necessarily staying within the NIE model. By contrast, the aim of the NIE method to predict and quantify outcomes, and the broader implications of the approach, are far more difficult to accept and defend. Particularly problematic is its commitment to certain kinds of growth as the desirable outcome of economic development, together with the assumption of the universal benefits of that growth, with its end point and golden standard explicitly or implicitly based on successful economies of the modern West.

This chapter follows the bachata from its earliest beginnings in Dominican Republic to its current position on the global stage, specifically investigating what happens when a music – made by and for local, rural audiences – crosses geographic borders and is suddenly performed by and for global, urban audiences; and what occurs when a music traditionally tied to place-specific experiences suddenly assumes contrasting positions of meaning.

Drawing on biblical texts and theological reflections from early Christianity to the present, three prominent ways in which the sacramentality of creation has been nuanced over the centuries are explored: (1) Experiencing the presence of God in the world with focus on Ignatius of Loyola’s final contemplation in his Spiritual Exercises; (2) reflecting on manifestations of God’s goodness, power and wisdom that eminent patristic and medieval theologians discerned when studying the world and novel attributes that are discernible today when informed by current scientific findings; and (3) receiving the Eucharist as a heightened encounter with God that can strengthen individuals and communities to act cooperatively. These three ways of perceiving the world within which we encounter God constitute a formula for venerating Earth that should stimulate Christian attitudes and actions aimed at mitigating impediments to the flourishing of our common home.

Modern historians of science often discuss the twelfth-century “discovery of nature” as a milestone in our relations with the environment. This article explores medieval scientific, literary, and theological writers who contributed to this distinctive set of attitudes even as it documents the significant continuities between these writings and those of classical and late antique authorities on the natural world. It traces how the encyclopedic imagination provided a hierarchical framework for understanding the world, and how this ontological scaffolding, in turn, underpinned the twelfth-century revival of Neoplatonic thought, as medieval Christian writers would enthusiastically adopt an earlier tradition of personifying nature. In the thirteenth century, this magisterial Natura came to reflect advances in the “new” Aristotelian science that would become the foundation of the medieval university curriculum. While the synthesis of Christian Neoplatonism and Aristotelian physis would remain the predominant model of nature for several centuries, it also occasioned polemical debates over how God related to the universe that he created and how knowledge of the natural world was to be valued and instrumentalized. This medieval vision of a human-scaled, personified nature would prove philosophically durable up to the Scientific Revolution.

This chapter introduces the reader to the volumes focus upon the human-nature relationship and the role Christianity has played in shaping it. Further, it considers the challenge of terminology around words such as ‘environment, ‘nature’, and others. A rationale for the volume’s focus upon Western Christianity is also set out. Finally, this chapter presents an introductory outline of the companion.

The extent of material inequality and its relationship to economic development are central questions for historians of all periods. In recent decades, historians of ancient Greece have sought to provide the basis for answering those questions by attempting to estimate the distribution of wealth and income in Athens (and to a lesser degree in other Greek poleis) by reference to statements in ancient texts, proxy data, and simple models. While there remains much room for debate on specifics, we suggest that, for certain periods of Athenian history, very rough, but nonetheless suggestive, estimates can be offered of the distribution of wealth across the citizen population and the distribution of income across the entire population. The chapter briefly sketches ancient Greek economic performance before discussing material inequality in Greece, with special reference to Athens, and in comparison with other premodern economies. It explains how Greek political institutions and competition among individuals and states drove comparatively high levels of growth, while inequality remained comparatively low. Finally, it tests this hypothesis against some more and less familiar facts about Greek history.

This chapter offers a guide to reading Plato’s dialogues, including an overview of his corpus. We recommend first considering each dialogue as its own unified work, before considering how it relates to the others. In general, the dialogues explore ideas and arguments, rather than presenting parts of a comprehensive philosophical system that settles on final answers. The arc of a dialogue frequently depends on who the individual interlocutors are. We argue that the traditional division of the corpus (into Socratic, middle, late stages) is useful, regardless of whether it is a chronological division. Our overview of the corpus gives special attention to the Republic, since it interweaves so many of his key ideas, even if nearly all of them receive longer treatments in other dialogues. Although Plato recognized the limits inherent in written (as opposed to spoken) philosophy, he devoted his life to producing these works, which are clearly meant to help us seek the deepest truths. Little can be learned from reports of Plato’s oral teaching or the letters attributed to him. Understanding the dialogues on their own terms is what offers the greatest reward.

The chapter offers a reading of Socrates’ fourfold classification, at Philebus 23c-27c of “all the things now in the universe” into what is without limit (the apeiron), limit (peras), mixtures of these two (the meikton) and the cause of said mixtures (aitia). Contrary to the classification’s more typical treatment as a general window onto Plato’s late ontology and whatever may be its broader horizons, this classification is argued to be tailored to the project of the dialogue, directed to an analysis of the metaphysics of craft objects. In developing and explaining the classification, Socrates puts in place material for an analogy drawn from the craft of medicine to the effect that as medicine stands to health so stands some as yet unidentified craft to the good condition of soul that is the dialogue’s central focus, responsible for the happy human life. In thus articulating a framework for the historically influential idea of a craft of human living, Socrates provides a heuristic through which, in the remainder of the dialogue, the life’s character and elements may be systematically explored with a view to the dialogue’s overall contest between pleasure and intelligence.

The chapter aims to show that Plato’s engagement with mystery cults – the Eleusinian mysteries and Orphic cults in particular – can illuminate centrally important topics of Plato’s philosophy, including his conception of the philosophical life, its relation to the human good, the role of memory in the knowledge of the Forms, and the soul’s kinship to the divine. It explores why and how Plato presents philosophy as the true initiation which can fulfil the promise of the mystery cults to offer the best human life and afterlife. It analyses why and how Plato describes the knowledge of the Forms on the model of the direct encounter with the divine at the culmination of a mystery ritual. It further suggests that the ‘birth’ announced at the highest point of the Eleusinian mysteries can shed new light on the role of ‘giving birth’ at the culmination of the philosophical life in the Symposium. Finally, it shows how Pythagorean and Orphic focus on memory offered Plato a framework to develop his account of the relationship between the soul and the divine Forms, reincarnation, and the fate of our soul in the afterlife.

This chapter introduces kokomakaku, a stickfight ritual from the Dutch island of Curaçao. Documenting its evolution and development, the chapter shows how music can be used to reconstruct a possible historical, social and cultural timeline of an island. Kokomakaku embodies the cultural encounters and conflicts that mark Curaçao’s past and present, its development, likewise, representing localised struggles for status and self-definition.

Given that “Nature” is historically imbricated in the history of Christianity, the secularizing movement of modernity puts nature under intense pressure. The resulting conflicts are modeled by the United States, which authorized political revolution by invoking “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” The American Transcendentalists extended nature as divine order and transcendent arbiter to authorize intellectual revolution, consolidating liberal Protestantism, European Romanticism, and modern science into a template for the meaning of nature in modernity; humans became not humble creatures in God’s creation but God’s avatars commanding all merely material beings. Today, as the resulting ecological collapse destabilizes inherited concepts of nature, “ecology” is offered as a replacement, even though ecology as a science cannot offer moral value or spiritual meaning. This intellectual history is traced through the founding work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who offered idealism as the engine of modernity, and three followers, Orestes Brownson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller, who variously pluralized nature into the plenitude of material forms and beings seen as vulnerable incarnations of a higher or divine life force, prefiguring the science and ethics of ecology as an aspect of, rather than replacement for, nature.