For example, his perceptions of an object that is either very small or very far away may be inaccurate because he cannot clearly and distinctly perceive the object at hand. ... The Mediator argues, "Now how do I know that he has not brought it about that there is no earth at all, no heavens, no extended things, no shape, no magnitude, no place-and yet that all these things appear to me to exist just as they do now (Descartes 15)?... He reasons that he may have lived his whole life believing false concepts because God has willed him to do so, or that at any moment God could make the seemi...

• Word Count: 1233
• Approx Pages: 5
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Though I share Phillips's belief that "we need to cure ecocriticism of its fundamentalist fixation on literal representation," the larger theory and critique of ecocriticism of the sort he pursues is beyond my scope here. (8) Rather, in paying greater attention to the sort of ecological literacy or, less anachronistically, the natural history writing and thinking that emerge in Emerson as it does in Thoreau, I will be arguing that both writers complicate the assumption that the literal and literary senses of things can be separated irreducibly in this way. ...

• Word Count: 9971
• Approx Pages: 40
• Grade Level: Undergraduate