Week 1: Originals and copies

Introduction

In this free course, Exploring philosophy: faking nature, you will examine the restoration thesis. But what is the restoration thesis?

Watch the following video that introduces the idea of the restoration thesis.

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Transcript: Introduction

DEREK MATRAVERS

Imagine a pristine landscape, a piece of nature that's escaped all human intervention. Well, now imagine that some valuable mineral has been found in that vicinity. A mining company says that they can extract the mineral, and even though the mining will make a mess, they promise to restore it afterwards to exactly how it looked before, exactly.

Now, most people think that something would have been lost. The landscape is simply not as valuable as it was before. But what has been lost? Are we assuming that not even an expert could tell the difference between the before and after? Now, if we can answer that, if we can save what's been lost, we are some way to finding out what we find valuable about nature.

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Introduction

This week you are going to look at the broad question of originals and copies. In many circumstances, originals are valued more than copies even if there is no obvious difference between them. Why is this? Is it just snobbery? If it is not just snobbery, what is it that makes an original more valuable? This ties into the broader question of why details of something’s history should make a difference to how it is thought about now.

This OpenLearn course is an adapted extract from the Open University course A853 MA Philosophy Part I [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] .