Tunguska, or the End of Nature ─ A Philosophical Dialogue

On June 30, 1908, a mysterious explosion erupted in the skies over a vast woodland area of Siberia. Known as the Tunguska Event, it has been a source of wild conjecture over the past century, attributed to causes ranging from meteors to a small black hole to antimatter. In this imaginative book, Michael Hampe sets four fictional men based on real-life scholarsa physicist (Gunter Hasinger and Steven Weinberg), a philosopher (Paul Feyerabend), a biologist (Adolf Portmann), and a mathematician (Alfred North Whitehead)adrift on the open ocean, in a dense fog, to discuss what they think happened. The result is a playful and highly illuminating exploration of the definition of nature, mankind’s role within it, and what its end might be.

Tunguska, Or the End of Nature uses its four-man setup to tackle some of today’s burning issuessuch as climate change, environmental destruction, and resource managementfrom a diverse range of perspectives. With a kind of foreboding, it asks what the world was like, and will be like, without us, whether we are negligible and the universe random, whether nature can truly be explained, whether it is good or evil, or whether nature is simply a thought we think. This is a profoundly unique work, a thrillingly interdisciplinary piece of scholarly literature that probes the mysteries of nature and humans alike.

Michael Hampe is professor of philosophy in the department of humanities, social, and political sciences at the ETH Zurich. He is the author of many books, includingThe Perfect Life: Four Meditations on Happiness. Michael Winkler is professor emeritus of German studies at Rice University. He has translated many books, including Uwe Steiner’sWalter Benjamin: An Introduction to His Work and Thought, also published by the University of Chicago Press.