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rendered continuous with science: itisscience
in its general and abstract reaches. A further
implication for the social sciences is an essen-
tial unity of method with the natural sciences
and, in some formulations, an actual identity
of subject matter as well.
The philosopher Roy Bhaskar, whose work
has been influential for several radical geog-
raphers, counterposes ‘critical naturalism’ to
scientific naturalism and its thesis of continu-
ity between the social and natural sciences. He
instead asserts that ‘ontological,epistemo-
logicalandrelationalconsiderations all place
limits on the possibility of naturalism (or
rather, qualify the form it must take); and
that these considerations all carry methodo-
logical import’ (1998 [1979], p. 3; author’s
italics). Thus, Bhaskar denies that natural
and social objects are alike in their make-up;
rejectsempirical realism(Humean epistemol-
ogy) in favour of transcendental or critical
realismas the protocol of knowledge more
appropriate to the human sciences; and offers
Marx’s analysis inCapitalas paradigmatic of
a substantive use of this transcendental
procedure (seerealism).
Baruch Spinoza’s naturalism is worth a men-
tion, given his current resurgence within
human geography and allied fields. While
the renewal proximately derives from studies
on Spinoza by scholars such as Gilles Deleuze,
Antonio Negri, Genevieve Lloyd and Louis
Althusser, their wide uptake by human geog-
raphers suggests a desire for anethicsand
politics of interaction rooted in an immanentist
ontology – that is to say, an affirmative ontology
of connections between human and non-
human entities that (a) denies any prior
separation ofnatureandsociety, (b) rejects
any form of transcendence (God or otherwise)
as source of an authorizing design ortelosfor
society, and (c) maintains that combinations of
bodies are all thereis, and our ethical–political
task is to dare to strive for sameness in ways
unknown. vgSuggested reading
Bhaskar (1998); De Caro and Macarthur (2004);
Lloyd and Gatens (1999); Negri (2000).nature A term with three main meanings: the essence or defining property of some-
thing;
a material realm untouched by human ac-
tivity; and
the entire living world, of which the human
species is a part.These meanings often overlap and are
sometimes contradictory. They are used in,
and reproduced through, everyday speech
as well as artistic and scientificdiscourses.
This multivalency led the cultural critic
Raymond Williams to observe that ‘nature is
perhaps the most complex word in the
[English] language’ (1983 [1976], p. 221)
and that a history of its changing use would
amount to a history of a large part of human
thought (ibid., p. 225). Something of these
complexities and histories can be glimpsed by
juxtaposing two Anglo-Western attitudes to
nature that are 300 years apart. The leading
British political commentator John Locke,
writing in the late seventeenth century,
as the European settlement of North America
got under way, made the following obser-
vation:
In the first ages of the world men were more
in danger to be lost, by wandering from their
company, in the then vast wilderness of the
earth, than to be straitened for want of room
to plant in. And the same measure may be
allowed still without prejudice to anybody,
as full as the world seems. (Locke, 1988
[1690], p. 294)
Writing in the late twentieth century, ascli-
matechange entered global public conscious-
ness, the North American environmental
observer Bill McKibben articulates a very
different vision:
An idea, a relationship, can go extinct just
like an animal or a plant. The idea in this
case is ‘nature’, the separate and wild prov-
ince, the world apart from man. [. .. ] By
changing the weather, we make every spot
on earth man-made and artificial. We have
deprived nature of its independence and
that is fatal to its meaning. (McKibben,
1990, pp. 48 and 58)
As both of these accounts suggest, there is a
powerfulgeographical imaginaryassociated
with the idea of nature, particularly with the
second of the three meanings identified above.
This geographical imaginary translates the cat-
egorical opposition between things attribut-
able to nature and those attributable to
human society into a spatial purification, in
which nature is understood as a pristinewil-
derness– a space–time outside or before the
presence (or taint) of human settlement or
activity (Cronon, 1995). It is an imaginary
with very real consequences as it is taken up
and reproduced through scientific, political
and legal practices (Delaney, 2003).Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_N Final Proof page 492 31.3.2009 3:13pm Compositor Name: ARajuNATURE