"This work is a superb philosophical exegesis of the conceptual underpinnings of the disaster of the Anthropocene. Katherine Snow discloses the origin of today's polycrisis as the bloated empowerment of a narrow rationality to know the whole, to seal reality within an enclosure that's in principle understandable by and at the disposal of anthropos, and to embolden anthropocentrism to such an extent that it has become a demonic force on the planet." --Eileen Crist, Associate Professor Emerita, Virginia Tech, USA In this work Snow presents a new interpretation of the famous Spinoza Controversy of around 1800, and the Controversy's return in the 1920s, which allows us to resume and deepen one side of the Controversy's past efforts to radically critique the same fatal romantic flaw which still remains today at the heart of Western philosophical and scientific naturalism. In Snow's reading, this flaw is the unfounded assertion that knowable necessity relations are ontologically ultimate for the external world - an assertion which (in its contemporary form) originated in the neo-Spinozistic, critical monist, view of nature put forward by the early German romantics in the fertile and tumultuous context of the original Spinoza Controversy, and which fended off its Controversy opponents, while facing almost no others, to grow increasingly intertwined with the self-interpretation of modern physics and cosmology, and with scientific and philosophical naturalism writ large, over the ensuing two centuries. For Snow, we must renew our attention to this flawed assertion today not only because it actually possesses neither philosophical nor scientific justification, but also because it underlies and automatically drives two interrelated current-day existential threats to the survival of Western rationality itself: first, our still deeply underestimated and mischaracterized, shockingly violent and total, environmental nihilism, manifest in our accelerating physical conversion and vanishing of the entire real world on earth outside ourselves; and second, our preference for increasingly definable and manipulable necessity-based "worlds" according to which much of society replaced any effort to live within science's necessity-based world first with an effort to live in a world ostensibly made of economic necessity relations alone, and now lately with an effort to inhabit one consisting only of sheerly informatic forms of necessity. Both the environmental and the social-epistemic elements of the crisis-point we currently occupy bear out the prescient forebodings of unavoidable environmental and cognitive nihilism of which the anti-Spinozistic sides of the past iterations of the Controversy warned should Western thought turn to claiming knowable necessity relations could generate real being. Katherine C. Snow is an environmental philosopher and research associate at Princeton University.

She received her PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2021.