This book explores ethics and the philosophy of nature in the Daodejing, the Zhuangzi, and related texts to elucidate their significance in our contemporary environmental crisis. The author explores early Daoism to provide insights for cultivating an expansive ecological ethos and environmental culture of nature.

Eric S. Nelson is Professor of Humanities at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He works on Chinese, German, and Jewish philosophy. He is the author of Levinas, Adorno, and the Ethics of the Material Other (SUNY Press, 2020) and Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy in Early Twentieth-Century German Thought (Bloomsbury, 2017). He has published over 75 articles and book chapters and is the editor of Interpreting Dilthey: Critical Essays (Cambridge University Press, 2019). He co-edited with François Raffoul the Bloomsbury Companion to Heidegger (Bloomsbury, expanded paperback edition 2016) and Rethinking Facticity (SUNY Press, 2008); with John Drabinski, Between Levinas and Heidegger (SUNY Press, 2014); with Giuseppe D'Anna and Helmut Johach, Anthropologie und Geschichte: Studien zu Wilhelm Dilthey aus Anlass seines 100. Todestages (Königshausen & Neumann, 2013); and with Antje Kapust and Kent Still, Addressing Levinas (Northwestern University Press, 2005).

1. Introduction: Early Daoist Ethics and the Philosophy of Nature 2. Nourishing Life, Cultivating Nature, and Environmental Philosophy 3. Wuwei, Responsive Attunement, and Generative Nature 4. Emptying Ecology: Nothingness, Language, and Encountering Things 5. Early Daoist Biopolitics and a New Daoist Political Ecology 6. Epilogue: Emptying Ecology and Chan Buddhism