Big Botany Lecture Series: Inside Big Botany

Ground-breaking philosopher Timothy Morton (Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English, Rice University) fuses the arts, humanities, and scientific scholarship to radically reconceptualize humankind’s relationship with the natural world. Morton introduces his concept of hyperobjects—entities of vast temporal and spatial dimensions, like the phenomena of climate change—and how they imply powerful consequences for how we understand and relate to them. Blown up as if in a gigantic microscope, hyperobjects reveal the paradoxical qualities of things in general, which are well exemplified by what we’re calling Big Botany and the human place within it.