"The Secret Folds of Nature: Eriugena's Expansive Concept of Nature(Physis)"

Dermot Moran
University College Dublin

Dermot Moran of University College Dublin is known internationally for his work in philosophy on twentieth-century phenomenology, but began his career with a primary focus on the distinctive philosophy of nature of the ninth-century Irish philosopher John Scottus Eriugena. Eriugena, hailed as the greatest Western philosopher between Augustine and Aquinas, remains relatively obscure, due partly to charges of heresy against him. Yet increasingly scholarship in recent years has celebrated Eriugena’s work as offering a creative Western approach to integrating human and natural perspectives, well within mystical Christian traditions yet also synthesizing Platonic, Pre-Socratic and native Irish attitudes toward nature, in ways that resonate with ecological thinking today.