In ‘Air’s Affinities’, Peter Adey (2015) adopts a premodern approach wherein an object’s elemental essence can be read directly from subjective encounter. This perspective effectively engages the material without endorsing determinism, the essential without endorsing the analytics of science and the power of the encounter without endorsing the radical subjectivity of phenomenology. However, it strips observation and analysis of its potential for critique, instead endorsing an outlook that is, at root, theological in its dependence on faith for understanding unobservable and unexplainable processes, elements, essences and affinities.
