FOR 1986:  The Role of Nature in Conceptualising Political Order: Ancient - Medieval - Early Modern

• Subject Area: Humanities ; Social and Behavioural Sciences
• Term: from 2013 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 228265259

This Research Unit aims to explore the role and diverse meanings of nature in conceptualising political order from antiquity through the Middle Ages to the early modern period. By combining the perspectives and expertise of different disciplines - history, politics and law, theology and philosophy, art history and literary studies - the Research Unit will bring an innovative approach to pre-modern conceptualisations of nature in their socio-political dimensions. Crossing disciplinary boundaries and habits of perception and looking beyond canonical texts and images, we examine the discursive functionalisations of nature in such ways as to illuminate both their synchronic variation and diachronic changes and reveal the conditions of their long-term historical impact. The common focus of the programme’s research is its concentration on the political as the centre of a societal reflection whose shaping power expresses itself in a variety of pre-modern discourses and practices of rulership. What is at issue, then, are definitions of man as a political animal, debates on the foundations of community, social hierarchy and the distribution of power, on the legitimacy of government, the authorisation of law and state institutions. When "nature" is employed to bolster specific concepts of political order, the polysemy of the term is rarely ever reduced to a single, unequivocal meaning. The argumentative force of the term, rather, derives from its semantic overdetermination, which offers a well-nigh inexhaustible resource for making (political) sense. But just as remarkable as the semantic mutations and adaptability of "nature" are the continuities of its use from the ancient world up to the threshold of modernity. The Research Unit’s combination of projects and the interactions between them are designed to do justice not only to the synchronic polysemy and diachronic changes of "nature" but also to the persistent authority and evidence-generating power of a small ensemble of basic ideas associated with the term.

• DFG Programme: Research Units

Projects

• Das gezähmte Chaos und die göttliche Gabe der Fruchtbarkeit. Naturmotivik in der althebräischen Königsideologie und ihre Transformation in der heilsgeschichtlichen Theologie des Alten Testaments (Applicants Levin, Christoph ;  Müller, Reinhard )
• Herrschernatur(en). Der 'Fürst der Sinne' in der Frühen Neuzeit (Applicant Pfisterer, Ulrich )
• Medicus politicus - medical conceptions for the protection and betterment of the natural human body in times of crisis (Applicant Gadebusch Bondio, Mariacarla )
• Natur als Argument in juridischen Diskursen und literarischen Imaginationen von der Frühen Neuzeit bis zur Aufklärung (Applicants Lepsius, Susanne ;  Vollhardt, Friedrich )
• Natur in der politischen Philosophie des Platonismus und Aristotelismus: Antike und mittelalterliche Positionen (Applicants Adamson, Ph.D., Peter ;  Rapp, Christof Karl )
• Natura as cosmic and political concept in Alanus's ab Insulis poetic works and in the Latin and vernacular reception (Applicant Kellner, Beate )
• Nature and Law in Early Modern English Literature: Shakespeare, Milton, Cavendish (Applicant Höfele, Andreas )
• Political Anthropology of Beast Epic (Applicant Waltenberger, Michael )
• The Nature of the Office. Analyzing the habitus, self- and body-concepts of corregidores of the Spanish Monarchy (16th-17th century) (Applicant Brendecke, Arndt )
• Zentralprojekt (Applicant Kellner, Beate )

• Spokesperson: Professorin Dr. Beate Kellner