Professor Samantha Vice
African Fellow, December 2024 - January 2025
Home institution: University of the Witwatersrand
Samantha Vice is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, South Africa. She has published extensively in ethics, aesthetics and social philosophy. Currently, she is interested in the intersection of ethics and aesthetics, particularly with regards to nature and animals. Her monograph, The Ethics of Animal Beauty, published by Lexington Press in 2023, explores the ethical dimension of our aesthetic appreciation of animals, developing an ethics of respect and care for animals from our enjoyment of their beauty. Her project at the IASH continues this work, focusing on how our knowledge of anthropogenic climate change affects our aesthetic appreciation of nature.
Project title: The Aesthetics of Nature in the Context of Anthropogenic Climate Change
My current research is broadly concerned with the relations between aesthetic and ethical values, and the way they may depend upon, reveal, and reinforce each other. While it might seem frivolous to be concerned with beauty in the face of the unprecedented and urgent challenges presented by climate change, I hope to show that our experiences of natural beauty can provide a deeper understanding of what is at risk and suggest resources for improving our relations with the environments on which we depend.
Against that general backdrop, my research at the IASH explores two aspects of the larger project: first, how knowledge of the anthropogenic causes of climate change affects our aesthetic appreciation of nature, and the implications for influential aesthetic concepts, such as beauty, the sublime, and wonder. If, as the notion of the anthropocene suggests, drawing a boundary between what is natural and what is human is untenable, what are the implications for an aesthetics of nature and for the central concepts which depend on such a distinction? Second, I explore the ethical implications of such altered experiences of nature, and of the conceptual complexities they suggest. Can we still rely on experiences of natural beauty to provide motivational resources to cope with the challenges we shall face in the future? What could our aesthetic responses reveal about our relations to nature, and how may ethical and aesthetic responses affect each other? While these questions suggest that our aesthetic experiences will be changed and complicated in the light of knowledge, I will explore how they may still be enriching and ethically productive.