Contracts – on Science, Politics and Nature

About this project

• The C3 Centre: Creative Industries and Creative Communities

The research examines the proposal in the work of Michel Serres that society has been based on the exclusion of nature and that it needs to be re-established on the basis of a new ‘contract’ that includes the natural world. 

One interpretation of an approach such as the one taken on this project is that the natural world should be given rights, but the research will argue that an appeal to a juridical sense of contract alone is inadequate. In addition, the ‘contract’ needs to be understood in the context of Serres’s generalised philosophy of communication and his account of complex dynamic systems. A recognition of the importance of disequilibrium marks this approach out from both traditional ecology and from deep ecology. It opens up new challenges and possibilities for thinking about the relation between science, political governance, local forms of organization, individual well-being, and our response to the climate emergency.

• WEBB, David (2018) The Virtue of Sensibility. In: Michel Serres and the Crises of the Contemporary. Bloomsbury Press, London. ISBN 9781350060692 )
• WEBB, David (2017) Causality and Law in Lucretius and Contemporary Cosmology. In: Contemporary Encounters with Ancient Metaphysics. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. ISBN 9781474412094 )
• WEBB, David (2020) Michel Serres on Virtue. In: Michel Serres: das vielfältige Denken. Willhelm Fink, Munich, Germany. ISBN 978-3-7705-6514-6 (In Press) )