In 1799, F.W.J. Schelling claimed that 'To philosophize about nature is to produce it'. Two centuries later Gilles Deleuze called for a philosophy of nature - Deleuze did so at a time when concerns with and concepts of artificial life and intelligence were already developing rapidly. How would such a philosophy of nature differ from our extant philosophies and sciences of nature? Working against current representationalist analyses of nature, On an Artificial Earth constructs a contemporary philosophy of nature such as Deleuze was working on before his death, based on its most extravagant exponent, F.W.J. Schelling. As well as providing a lucid account of the major works in the philosophy of nature by Schelling and those of his scientific contemporaries who pursued and furthered that project, the book reconstructs Schelling's speculative physics in order to examine the most widely contested of today's scientific and cultural problems, from intelligence and material architecture to artificial life, technological evolution and genomics.

Author Biography

Iain Hamilton Grant is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of the West of England. He has written widely on post-Kantian European philosophy and is translator of Lyotard's Libidinal Economy and Baudrillard's Symbolic Exchange and Death.