Welcome to our course site. Here we hope to reflect upon the many ways in which the natural world impinges upon our thinking, feeling, imagining and constructs who we are in relation to the world around us.
I encourage you to post ideas, musings, poems, photos, videos–anything that captures your own imaginative encounters with the elements.
I look forward to following along, and perhaps contributing!
Please do so! While this course invites my students and myself to reflect upon the elements of nature and our own insertion into and constitution by that world, comments and conributions are welcome from all sources.
I thought these four short videos on earth, air, fire, and water might be of interest:
http://drewmovie.com/
Scroll down the link to view them. — David M.
David, thank you for sharing these with us! (Sorry for the lag in reply.)
Alas, when I went to view the videos, there seemed to be problems…
I ran across this article, which explores Elemental Philosophy. It compares my (David Macauley) book with the work of Gaston Bachelard and some writing by Jane Bennett. It’s an essay by James Smith called “New Bachelards?: Reveries, Elements and Twenty-First Century Materialisms.” I thought I would share it with the class:
http://www.academia.edu/1953277/New_Bachelards_Reveries_Elements_and_Twenty-First_Century_Materialisms