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41. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 16 > Issue: 2
Marjolein Oele E-Co-Affectivity Beyond the Anthropocene: Rethinking the Role of Soil to Imagine a New “Us”
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Following Isabelle Stengers’s call that the anthropocene should make us feel and think differently, this paper focuses on the human task to shift its affective response. Since Stengers calls for a new “us” that seeks to participate in an entanglement, I propose to explore the material and ontogenetic functions of soil, and specifically soil pores, in reimagining a new form of e-co-affectivity. A new e-co-affective response would emphasize the usually hidden fluidity and diachronic time of pores, and, in doing so, cultivate an epistemic and aesthetic sensitivity, deceleration, and percolation.
42. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 16 > Issue: 2
Gerard Kuperus Listening to the Salmon: Latour’s Gaia, Aboriginal Thinking, and the Earth Community
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When salmon disappear, their loss is felt among many species of animals, trees, and plants. This essay suggests listening to the salmon when it comes to learning how to become better members of the earth community, so that not our presence, but our absence would be a loss to the ecosystems that we dwell in. This argument is made through a discussion of Latour’s Facing Gaia and the Native American philosophy of the Tlingit. Albeit in different terms, both suggest ways to become better participants in a greater unity.
43. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 16 > Issue: 2
Lauri Lahikainen, Orcid-ID Tero Toivanen Working the Biosphere: Towards an Environmental Philosophy of Work
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Humans have arguably become a geological force that is changing the planet in profound and catastrophic ways. But what are the human practices that have such force? In this paper, we argue that work is exactly such a practice and that it is as workers that many of us are agents of global environmental change. When carbon dioxide is emitted or forests are cut down, someone is working. Yet we lack adequate descriptive and normative theories of work to understand how we are a geological force. In this paper, we suggest possible beginnings for an environmental philosophy of work.
44. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Lorraine Code Thinking Ecologically, Knowing Responsibly
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This essay extends my engagements with questions of epistemic agency and the politics of epistemic location, in Epistemic Responsibility and in Ecological Thinking to consider how questions of understanding and of certainty play diversely into human and other ecological circumstances. In so doing, it opens lines of inquiry not immediately available in standard western-northern approaches to epistemology with their concentration on medium-sized physical objects in their presupposed neutrality and replicability. Working from a tacit assumption that knowing and knowers are always situated, and that they are enabled or restricted in so being, the book engages with specific epistemic situations in order to show how “situatedness” indeed makes knowledge possible, while regarding it as an enabling rather than a constraining modality.
45. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Claire Colebrook Is There Something Wrong With the Task of Thinking?
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One way to approach the widely acknowledged failure to act on climate change would be to turn to the philosophical tradition, going back to Kant at least, that diagnoses all the internal impediments to thinking. It is with Heidegger, however, that thinking is curiously divided between a disclosure of the world, and the world’s occlusion. Rather than pursue Heidegger’s project of destroying throught’s accretions and returning to the world I will argue that it is the very concept of ‘thinking’ in the grand sense that needs to be destroyed if we are to be open to the future.
46. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Eduardo Mendieta Anthropocenic Temporalities: The Time of the End and the End of Time
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The Anthropocene must also be seen as the convergence of the historicization of nature and human historicity, not simply metaphorically, but factually. As historical time is injected in nature (which putatively was beyond historical time) through anthropogenesis, resulting in our having to see nature as a product of a historical process, our understanding of time is being transformed. The Anthropocene must be understood as a temporalization of time tout court. The key concern is what could be called an Anthropocenic matrix of intelligibility and its corresponding image of Anthropos. In the time of the end of time and the time of the end, the new image of humanity is that of a destroyer of world(s).
47. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Michael Marder What Needs to Change in Our Thinking about Climate Change (and about Thinking)
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In this article I argue that, the consciousness of climate change will remain wanting, unless it reaches all the way to the level of self-consciousness. Interrelating the meanings of “climate” and “thinking,” I suggest that only an approach that shuns subjective mastery and distance will be adequate to this peculiar non-object.
48. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Luce Irigaray How Could We Rescue the World Today?
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The distress of our world, and the danger in which we are today, force us to think about the way according to which life can still be saved, beginning with our human life. The undertaking of thinking must take root again in what is most essential for life itself, and for its cultivation. This requires us to question about the manner in which our tradition has assembled beings into a whole, but also the manner in which we can collect and gather ourselves together—each one and between us. Obviously, money cannot achieve such undertaking. Sexuate difference could if we become able to perceive and acknowledge its importance for human life, for its development, and for its sharing.
49. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Albert Borgmann Being in the Anthropocene: World Appropriation in the Age of Global Warming
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We live in the anthropocene, the era of global warming. How are Americans responding to this predicament? To answer the question we need a philosophical concept of a collective mood and then empirical support to make it concrete. The result is a collective ground state. It has gone through the stages of confident prosperity, the dissolution of that confidence, the present state of anxious disorientation, and the hopeful prospect of grounded responsibility.
50. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Chie Sakakibara, Elise Horensky, Sloane Garelick Indigenous Peoples and Climate Change: Humanistic Explorations of Cultural Resilience
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In this essay, we will discuss the lessons that we have learned in a course titled “Indigenous Peoples and Climate Change” regarding Indigenous efforts and epistemologies to cope with stresses and plights induced by global climate change. Primarily informed by humanistic perspectives, we examine how Indigenous peoples, especially those of North America, process climate change through their cultural values and social priorities, with a particular focus on human emotions or feelings associated with their homeland, which often called sense of place or belonging, in contrast to the abstract concepts that originate from the natural sciences.
51. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Tim Christion Motivating a “Thinkable Politics”: A Critical Phenomenology of Climate Response
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Climate change is one of the greatest collective action problems ever faced. The social and cultural barriers to intersubjectively motivating concern and agency are sweeping. It seems all but impossible to imagine politically viable solutions commensurate with the realities of the problem, and likewise find visionary ways of framing this problem to inspire meaningful solutions. One therefore perceives an abyss between ‘problem’ and ‘solution,’ as expressed in irreconcilable debates between problem-driven and solution-driven strategies for motivating climate action. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s dialectical phenomenology of motivation and class consciousness in particular, I argue that his call for a “thinkable politics” can help activists bring problem-driven and solution-driven motives for climate response into productive relation.
52. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Hasana Sharp Not all Humans: Radical Criticism of the Anthropocene Narrative
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Earth scientists have declared that we are living in “the Anthropocene,” but radical critics object to the implicit attribution of responsibility for climate disruption to all of humanity. They are right to object. Yet, in effort to implicate their preferred villains, their revised narratives often paint an overly narrow picture. Sharing the impulse of radical critics to tell a more precise and political story about how we arrived where we are today, this paper wagers that collective action is more effectively mobilized when we identify multiple agencies and diverse historical processes as sites in need of urgent intervention.
53. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Nancy Tuana From a Lifeboat Ethic to Anthropocenean Sensibilities
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To claim that “humans have become a geological agent,” to worry that “humans are interrupting, refashioning, and accelerating natural processes” is to reinforce metaphysical divides—humans and nature, the cultural and the natural. It is furthermore to reinforce all the narratives from which these divides are animated: modernity, colonialization, enlightenment with their attendant discourses of progress, control, and purity. In its place I advocate Anthropocenean sensibilities. Sensibilities in which our attentiveness to influences and exchanges becomes heightened, where we learn to live in the midst of change, with a new responsiveness to uncertainties that render not-knowing animating rather than paralyzing.
54. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 17 > Issue: 2
Rudy Kahsar A Heideggerian Analysis of Renewable Energy and The Electric Grid: Converting Nature to Standing Reserve
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Renewable energy technology is often seen as a positive expression of technology, meeting energy needs with minimal environmental impact. But, by integrating nature (e.g., wind and sunlight) with the ordering of the electric grid, renewables silently convert that nature into what Martin Heidegger referred to as standing reserve—resources of the technological commodity chain to be ordered, controlled, converted, and consumed on demand. However, it may be possible to mitigate the downsides of this process through a transition to more decentralized, local sources of renewable energy operations and management that maintain awareness of the ways in which energy is generated and distributed.
55. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 17 > Issue: 2
Thomas H. Bretz Animating the Inanimate—A Deconstructive-Phenomenological Account of Animism
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This paper investigates the plausibility of one aspect of animism, namely the experience of other-than-human (including so-called inanimate) beings as exhibiting a kind of inaccessible interiority. I do so by developing a parallel between Husserl’s account of our experience of other conscious beings and our experience of non-conscious as well as so-called inanimate beings. I establish this parallel based on Derrida’s insistence on the irreducibility of context. This allows me to show how the structure of presence qua absence characteristic of our experience of conscious others emerges in our experience of non-conscious beings as well.
56. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 17 > Issue: 2
Lucy Schultz Climate Change and the Historicity of Nature in Hegel, Nishida, and Watsuji
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While the existence of nature distinct from human influence becomes evermore suspect, within the natural sciences, human beings are increasingly understood in naturalistic terms. The collision of the human and natural, both within conceptual discourse and the reality of climate change may be considered a “great event” in the Hegelian sense, that reveals a dialectic immanent within the nature/culture distinction. Nishida’s notion of “historical nature,” Watsuji’s unique conception of climate, and the traditional satoyama landscapes of Japan offer timely ways of understanding the sublation of the distinction between nature and culture that render the nature/spirit hierarchy found in Hegel obsolete.
57. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 17 > Issue: 2
Matthew Hall Orcid-ID How Plants Live: Individuality, Activity, and Self
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The recent proliferation of human-plant (or plant-human) studies are informed by understandings of how plants live. Philosopher Michael Marder has developed a philosophy of plant ontology, founded on notions of modular independence, radical openness and ontological indifference. This paper critiques, and ultimately rejects, Marder’s key concepts, using a swathe of empirical evidence and theory from the plant sciences and evolutionary ecology. It posits a number of positive statements about these aspects of plant being that better align with the scientific evidence base. The implications for plant ethics are also briefly explored.
58. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 17 > Issue: 2
Brian Hisao Onishi The Uncanny Wonder of Being Edible to Ticks
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In this paper I argue that an encounter with a tick can produce both fear and wonder. I make a distinction between the legitimate danger of tick borne-diseases and the non-danger of our entanglement with the nature revealed by the tick’s bite in order to highlight the goodness of the tick and the possibilities for post-human existences beyond narratives of conquest and control. Ultimately, I argue that wonder is a helpful mechanism for thinking through the goodness of the tick by allowing an ungrounding of our assumptions about climate change, hospitality, and the danger of non-human agencies.
59. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 17 > Issue: 2
O’neil Van Horn A Phenomenology of the Ground: Or, Notes on the Fallacy of Un-Earth-ing Philosophy
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In light of the already-here disasters of the Anthropocene, what might it mean to define “ground” phenomenologically? That is, if one is to get beyond the ‘merely rational’ and enter into the ‘dustier’ matters of ecological philosophizing, how might one phenomenologically consider the ground? This article will dwell on the nature of the earth-ground—or, soil—as a rematerialized grounding principle for phenomenology in this age of climate crisis. Contending with Heidegger, among others, this poietic article limns possibilities for a ‘grounded’ phenomenology.
60. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 18 > Issue: 1
Julia D. Gibson Orcid-ID Climate Justice for the Dead and the Dying: When Past-Oriented Environmentalism Isn’t Enough
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Environmentalism has long placed heavy emphasis on strategies that seek to ensure the environment of today and the future roughly mirror the past. Yet while past-oriented approaches have come under increased scrutiny, environmental ethics in the time of climate change is still largely conceptualized as that which could pull humanity back from the brink of disaster or, at least, prevent the worst of it. As a result, practical and conceptual tools for grappling with what is owed to the dead and dying victims of environmental injustice have been and continue to be woefully underdeveloped. This paper advances scaffolding for robust environmental death ethics that are temporally pluralistic and at home within intergenerational climate justice.