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Full Description
Explore ideas, consider the big questions and learn life lessons in your garden.
Gardening is an innately thoughtful as well as practical pastime: planning ahead, imagining how plants will grow, deciding what will make a 'good' garden, wondering at the beauty of flowers and noticing how ecosystems work.
This delightful and engaging collection of essays illustrate how many philosophical ideas arise naturally in gardeners' everyday work.
Growers by their nature are in fact already philosophers:
existentialists who try to live and work by their own rules in a garden;
stoics who put up with slug damage again and again, and try to work in harmony with nature;
and practical quantum scientists who witness incredible processes going on in plant cells beneath the ground.
In Philosophy for Gardeners, Kate Collyns uses aspects of gardening to introduce and explore a range of philosophical ideas and schools of thought; cultivating a greater understanding and appreciation of intriguing concepts, propagated from science, evolution and aesthetics through to politics, economics and ethics.
Broken into four sections, Soil, Growth, Harvest and Cycles, each section explores questions of philosophy through the lens of the garden. A fascinating read, this book is as perfect for students of philosophy as it is for gardeners, filled with thought-provoking reflections on life, being and existence.
Contents
Introduction
Part 1: Soil
1.Mysteries of the soil
Plato's Cave & unobserved causes
2.Planning the Garden
Imposing our individual rule on the natural world
3.Natural harmonies
Becoming one with nature
4. Utilitarianism & the greater good
Fairness in the garden
5.What's in a name?
How important are definitions and accuracy?
Part 2: Growth
6.Evolution & the plant-pest arms race
Darwin & worries about genetic modification in plants
7. The kindness of plants
Game theory & why cooperation is best
8.Nature versus nurture
When is a blank slate not blank?
9.Photosynthesis: quantum biology in plants
Quantum physics in the garden
10.Weeding: Zeno's Paradox
How can change happen when distance & time are infinitely divisible?
Part 3: Harvest
11.The perfect tomato
Do ideal forms exist on a higher plane?
12.Art & beauty
Is beauty in the eye of the beholder?
13.Miracle berries: are senses reliable?
Is a lemon sweet or sour?
14.Minding your peas & cues
How can we know anything?
15.Wealth from the dirt
Economics & the origin of value
Part 4: Cycles
16.Methuselah trees
The Ship of Theseus identity paradox
17.Heaps of seeds
Logic & the sorites paradox
18.Composting: ultimate recycling
Entropy & reincarnation
19.In the shed: ethics & the pursuit of happiness
How to live the Good Life
20.The pragmatic gardener
Practical philosophy & getting off Buridan's Ass
Further Reading
Index
