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Hello in Child How Holds Purge, Byron wrote, There is a pleasure in the Pathless Woods.

There's a rapture on the lonely shore.

That is society where non intrudes by the deep sea and music in its roar.

I love not man the less but nature more.

In the book of Genesis nature was the Paradise of Eden,

but for the philosopher Thomas Hobbes it was a place of

perpetual war where the life of man was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

The defining of nature, whether red in tooth and claw claw or as the font of all innocence is an attempt to define man's origins and purpose and humanity's part in the natural world.

With me to explore the philosophy of nature is Roger Scrutin, Professor of Philosophy at Buckingham University, Jonathan Bates, professor of English

literature at the University of Warwick and Karen Edwards lecture in English at the University

of Exeter.

Karen Edwards, the Greeks used to turn to Homer as I understand it for guidance on just about everything.

What did they find in him in 800 BC or thereabouts about nature?

They found a lot that was complicated. I think that will probably be a theme of the morning.

Raymond Williams said that nature is the most, is probably the most complicated word in the language.

But in Homer, there are some fascinating ways in which the relationship between human beings and nature are represented.

First of all, I think there's an anxiety about where human beings fit in the scheme of things,

an anxiety that human beings might be turning into animals or could very easily.

...