Elemental philosophy. Earth, air, fire, and water as environmental ideas

摘要

With an ambition that often seems as desultory as the sources mustered to pursue it - from Rilke to Rumi, Simone Weil, Mircea Eliade, Jung, Chateaubriand, Saint Exupery, Shakespeare, the Upanishads, Arthur C. Clarke, and 'a second century Confucian', to name only a few, seemingly any quotation to have ever used one of the words 'earth,' 'air,' 'water,' or 'fire' or 'element(al)' this is a book with the advantage of touching many things, and the disadvantage of grasping only a few. As a scholarly work, Elemental Philosophy can probably be said to cohere around the argument that the ancient Greeks' concept of 'the elements' retains ethical and aesthetic relevance despite its scientific debunking.