Research

Philosophy for Life, Culture, Nature and Community

Naturalism in Philosophy, Ethics and Politics

Vanessa’s research investigates the relationship between the human being and its natural and social environments. It examines a central question: what difference does being a part of living nature make for human culture and politics? What type of political and social arrangements best accommodate this ‘double’ nature of the human being?

In her published work she examines these questions through studies of the philosophy of Nietzsche. After Darwin, Nietzsche is generally credited with giving the decisive impulse towards naturalism in philosophy, ethics and politics. In her book Nietzsche’s Animal Philosophy, she developed a naturalistic conception of culture that does justice to the creative capacities of human beings to give meaning to the world. She has since broadened the scope of her research to include the question of what we can learn from plants about our ways of relating to the external world, exploring our inherent interconnectedness and dependence on other forms of life.

Biopolitics and Community

Vanessa is interested in the area of biopolitics which studies how human beings seek to govern themselves by controlling and manipulating the conditions of their existence and reproduction as a biological species. The main contributions to this emerging field come from contemporary French and Italian philosophers such as Michel Foucault and Roberto Esposito, both of whom recognize Nietzsche as a fundamental source for their ideas.

Vanessa has argued that the biological life we share with other species offers the basis to think in new ways about the grounds of community and their resilience. In particular, her research outlines the advantages that community-building derives from the inclusion of natural differences and their resistance to normalization over against the integration of individuals solely in virtue of artificially constructed identities. She has developed this idea to work out a naturalistic basis to non-utilitarian accounts of justice. In her most recent research she has broadened her study of how in early Greek philosophy the call to return to nature was coeval with a cosmopolitan approach to politics. Her work on the overcoming of the nature/culture distinction in Greek philosophy also informs her proposed research into the Cynics and their ideas of the kinds of obligations and responsibilities of human beings towards their communities of life.

Philosophical Anthropology and Posthumanism

Vanessa’s research in philosophical anthropology seeks to shed light on Nietzsche’s understanding of human nature and of philosophy as tasked with the renaturalisation of humanity. Following Foucault’s critique of the human sciences, she investigates the reception of Nietzsche’s naturalism in philosophical anthropology, psychoanalysis and gender studies.

In her book, Homo Natura, she investigates the relevance of Friedrich Nietzsche’s thinking about human nature for contemporary debates in posthumanism. In her current research, she raises the question of whether climate change and environmental catastrophes from species extinction to pandemics are the price we pay for our increasing disconnection from our natural environment. She explores the on-going “plant” and “planetary” turn in the humanities and social sciences and bring both to bear on the burning question of how we should inhabit this planet now that our own actions are making it uninhabitable for so many members of the community of life. It asks what nature can teach us about how to bridge worlds and reconnect humans to earth and planetary life.