Abstract In the critical tradition, environmental education discourse interrogates how knowledge constructs experience. But environmental education also emphasises perceiving, understanding and responding to “more-than-human” beings and processes. These two motivations are in tension. One problem is that the epistemological orientation driving the critique of knowledge seems to render access to something more-than-human a priori impossible. But environmental education squanders its promise and its dream if only ever permitted to talk about the natural world with scarequotes. Our field urgently needs to develop a realism robust against epistemologies that construct impassable barriers between humans and the rest of creation. I propose that this starts with radically reconceiving the nature and relationship between similarity and difference, interpreted in this article as the dynamic between theme and variations. Reworking Windelband’s distinction between idiographic and nomothetic research, I suggest that the relationship between theme and variation manifests a fundamental ontological pattern that pervades all things. “Theme and variation” proposes a unifying metaphysical duality in which the more-than-human reveals itself in how things suggest, conform to, modulate, and violate generalisation. Acknowledging and investigating this is part of restoring to other beings and processes their metaphysical, aesthetic, and ethical status, from the skies to the psyche.

中文翻译：

---

恢复现实主义：主题和变化

摘要 在批判传统中，环境教育话语质疑知识如何建构经验。但环境教育也强调感知、理解和回应“超越人类”的存在和过程。这两种动机处于紧张状态。一个问题是，推动知识批判的认识论取向似乎使人们无法获得超越人类先验的东西。但是，如果环境教育只允许用恐吓语来谈论自然世界，它就会浪费它的承诺和梦想。我们的领域迫切需要发展一种现实主义，反对在人类与其他创造物之间构建不可逾越的障碍的认识论。我建议从根本上重新认识相似性和差异性之间的性质和关系开始，在本文中解释为主题和变体之间的动态。重新审视温德尔班德对具体研究和规范研究之间的区别，我认为主题和变奏之间的关系体现了一种普遍存在的基本本体论模式。“主题与变体”提出了一种统一的形而上学二元性，在这种二元性中，超人类通过事物如何暗示、符合、调节和违反概括来揭示自己。承认和调查这一点是恢复其他生命并处理他们从天空到心灵的形而上学、美学和伦理地位的一部分。我认为主题和变奏之间的关系体现了一种普遍存在的基本本体论模式。“主题与变体”提出了一种统一的形而上学二元性，在这种二元性中，超人类通过事物如何暗示、符合、调节和违反概括来揭示自己。承认和调查这一点是恢复其他生命并处理他们从天空到心灵的形而上学、美学和伦理地位的一部分。我认为主题和变奏之间的关系体现了一种普遍存在的基本本体论模式。“主题与变体”提出了一种统一的形而上学二元性，在这种二元性中，超人类通过事物如何暗示、符合、调节和违反概括来揭示自己。承认和调查这一点是恢复其他生命并处理他们从天空到心灵的形而上学、美学和伦理地位的一部分。