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

本研究单元旨在探索自然在概念化从古代到中世纪到现代早期的政治秩序中的作用和不同意义。通过结合不同学科的观点和专业知识-历史，政治和法律，神学和哲学，艺术史和文学研究-研究单位将带来一种创新的方法，在其社会政治层面的自然前现代概念化。跨越学科界限和感知习惯，超越经典文本和图像，我们研究自然的话语功能化，以阐明其共时变化和历时变化，并揭示其长期历史影响的条件。该方案研究的共同重点是其集中在政治作为社会反思的中心，其塑造力量在各种前现代话语和统治实践中表达出来。因此，争论的焦点是将人定义为政治动物，关于社区基础、社会等级和权力分配的辩论，关于政府合法性、法律和国家机构的授权的辩论。当“自然”被用来支持政治秩序的具体概念时，这个词的多义性很少被简化为一个单一的、明确的含义。相反，这个术语的论证力量来自其语义的过度决定，这为（政治）意义提供了几乎取之不尽的资源。但是，与“自然”一词的语义变化和适应性同样引人注目的是，它的使用从古代世界一直延续到现代的门槛。研究单位的项目组合和它们之间的相互作用的目的是做正义不仅对“自然”的共时多义和历时变化，但也对持久的权威和证据生成的权力与长期相关的一个小合奏的基本思想。

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 programmes 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 Units 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.