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Displaying: 1-20 of 23 documents


articles
1. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 12 > Issue: 2
Pierfrancesco Biasetti From Beauty to Love: A Kantian Way to Environmental Moral Theory?
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In this paper, I set myself what many people would consider an unfeasible task: finding a Kantian way to an environmental moral theory. The paper is divided in four parts. In the first part I show why looking at Kant’s moral theory in order to build an environmental theory is like trying to get blood out of a stone. I then show how it should be, instead, possible to build an environmental theory by bridging Kant’s account of aesthetic value with love of nature. In the last two parts of the paper I deal with some possible criticisms and sketch the contours of the environmental stance born from Kant’s aesthetic treatment of nature.
2. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 12 > Issue: 2
Andrew J. Corsa Henry David Thoreau: Greatness of Soul and Environmental Virtue
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I read Henry David Thoreau as an environmental virtue theorist. In this paper, I use Thoreau’s work as a tool to explore the relation between the virtue of greatness of soul and environmental virtues. Reflecting on connections between Thoreau’s texts and historical discussions of greatness of soul, or magnanimity, I offer a novel conception of magnanimity. I argue that (1) to become magnanimous, most individuals need to acquire the environmental virtue of simplicity; and (2) magnanimous individuals must possess the environmental virtue of benevolence in order to achieve their goals.
3. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 12 > Issue: 2
Patrik Baard Change of Plans?: An Environmental Pragmatist View on Reconsidering Long-term Goals
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Sustainable ecosystem management often requires setting goals despite uncertainty regarding the achievability and desirability of the intended state of affairs. Coming to doubt the achievability or desirability of a previously set goal might sometimes, but not always, require reconsidering that goal. There is, however, a need to strike a balance between responsiveness to new information and knowing when to retain goals despite doubts. By critically engaging with adaptive ecosystem management (AEM), as advocated by environmental pragmatist Bryan G. Norton, criteria for warranted reconsideration of long-term goals are investigated.
4. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 12 > Issue: 2
Patrícia Vieira Phytographia: Literature as Plant Writing
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This article develops the notion of plant writing or phytographia, the roots of which go back to the early modern concept of signatura rerum, as well as, more recently, to Walter Benjamin’s idea of a “language of things” and to Jacques Derrida’s arche-writing. Phytographia designates the encounter between the plants’ inscription in the world and the traces of that imprint left in literary works, mediated by the artistic perspective of the author. The final section of the essay turns to the so-called “jungle novel,” set in the Amazonian rainforest, as an instantiation of phytographia.
5. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 12 > Issue: 2
Michael Goldsby, W. John Koolage Climate Modeling: Comments on Coincidence, Conspiracy, and Climate Change Denial
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Despite overwhelming evidence that climate change is real and represents a serious challenge for human flourishing, many still hold that climate change is not a credible threat—including a surprising number of broadcast meteorologists. In this article, we look at the logic that underwrites such an attitude, which typically appeals to a distrust of climate models, natural variability, or the presence of a conspiracy. Using a model selection framework, championed by Elliott Sober and Malcolm Forster, we will show that appeals to such lines of reasoning do not provide sufficient warrant to dismiss the predictions of climate models.
6. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 12 > Issue: 2
Wendy Farley Truth, Beauty, and Climate Change: A Dialogue With Continental Philosophy about Living With Denial
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This paper accesses continental philosophy to explore an analogy between the destruction caused by lack of resistance to National Socialism and the destruction caused by climate change denial. Husserl, Levinas, et alia identified a spirit of abstraction and ideology as elements of a catastrophic cultural crisis. Just as human beings were denuded of personhood, the natural world is denuded of inherent meaning. Social communication degenerates into anti-rational propaganda. Together these undermine response to climate change. Invigorating a genuine desire for truth and appreciation of the non-utilitarian good of beauty may provide some resource for undoing denial.
book reviews
7. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 12 > Issue: 2
Thomas Cheney Karen Lykke Syse and Martin Lee Mueller, eds. Sustainable Consumption and the Good Life: Interdisciplinary Perspectives
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8. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 12 > Issue: 2
Abigail Levin Cynthia Willett. Interspecies Ethics
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9. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 12 > Issue: 2
Jonathan Maskit Malcolm Miles. Eco-Aesthetics: Art, Literature and Architecture in a Period of Climate Change
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10. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 12 > Issue: 2
Eva Maria Räpple Alfred Kentigern Siewers, ed. Re-Imagining Nature: Environmental Humanities and Ecosemiotics
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11. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 12 > Issue: 2
Andrew F. Smith Michael Marder. The Philosopher’s Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium
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articles
12. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 12 > Issue: 1
Jonathan Beever An Ecological Turn in American Indian Environmental Ethics
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In this paper I argue that, instead of standing as an exemplar of contemporary environmentalism, North American Indian voices on the environment offer insights concerning ecological relationships that can be brought to bear on theories of environmental value and the politics of environmentalism. I argue that environmentally orthodox representations of Native views are further complicated by the metaphysics of local ecological knowledge. I then argue that moral ecologism, a normative view focused on inter­dependence throughout the living world and evidenced by contemporary American Indian voices, can help align traditional environmentalism with the contemporary scientific understanding of ecological relationships.
13. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 12 > Issue: 1
Abigail Levin Zoo Animals as Specimens, Zoo Animals as Friends: The Life and Death of Marius the Giraffe
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The international protest surrounding the Copenhagen Zoo’s recent decision to kill a healthy giraffe in the name of population management reveals a deep moral tension between contemporary zoological display practices—which induce zoo-goers to view certain animals as individuals, quasi-persons, or friends—and the traditional objectives of zoos, which ask us only to view animals as specimens. I argue that these zoological display practices give rise to moral obligations on the part of zoos to their visitors, and thus ground indirect duties on behalf of zoos to their animals. I conclude that zoos might take on interspecies friendship as a new zoological objective.
14. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 12 > Issue: 1
Roger Paden Nature, Disorder, and Tragedy: Towards an Evolutionary Aesthetic
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This paper outlines a normative/philosophical theory of evolutionary aesthetics, one that differs substantially from existing explanatory/psychological theories, such as Dutton’s. This evolutionary theory is based on Carlson’s scientific cognitivism, but differs in that it is based on evolutionary rather than ecological theory. After offering a short account of Carlson’s theory, I distinguish it from a normative evolutionary aesthetics. I then explore an historically important normative/philosophical theory of the aesthetics of nature that is consistent with Darwin’s theory of natural selection; namely, the theory of the picturesque. Finally, after summarizing Nietzsche’s early theory of tragedy, I discuss how some of his ideas might be incorporated into an evolutionary aesthetics.
15. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 12 > Issue: 1
Susan NoorMohammadi The Role of Poetic Image in Gaston Bachelard’s Contribution to Architecture: The Enquiry into an Educational Approach in Architecture
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This paper addresses Gaston Bachelard’s phenomenology of imagination. In his book The Poetics of Space, Bachelard stresses two major elements that are significant in the creation of real images: imagination and memory. Throughout The Poetics of Space, he speaks explicitly of houses of memory and dreams and homes of childhood. However Bachelard does not speak directly of architecture, his contribution to architecture needs to be analyzed and interpreted precisely. This objective is accomplished by arguing for two basic concepts in Bachelard’s thought: the development of the concept of meaning, and recourse to the function of inhabiting. Further, the knowledge gaps in the link between inhabitation and architecture are addressed through a proposal to implicate the phenomenology of imagination in architectural education.
16. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 12 > Issue: 1
Michael Marder The Sense of Seeds, or Seminal Events
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In this text, I suggest that we approach the theme of “the event” through vegetal processes, concepts, and metaphors. Mediated through plant life, the event unfolds along three axes: 1) that of excrescence, or the out-growth, which is how plants appear in the world; 2) that of expectation, or the out-look, waiting for germination and ultimately for fruition; and 3) that of the exception, or the out-take, which extracts the seed from the closed circuit of potentiality and actuality, committing it to chance. The nascent model I propose sheds light on our animalist prejudices hidden in ostensibly abstract thought and offers a fresh starting point for postmetaphysical ontology.
17. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 12 > Issue: 1
Donald S. Maier, Jeffrey A. Lockwood Conservation as Picking up Trash in Nature
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This essay explores a previously unexplored suggestion for combining consideration of aesthetics with considerations of vice and virtue to justify, not merely claims about nature’s beauty or its preservation, but landscape-transforming conservation projects. Its discussion is not univocal. On the one hand, it suggests that vices associated with humans assisting a creature’s journey to a new landscape make that organism’s presence on that landscape ugly. According to this suggestion, the creature may be regarded as trash, which would be virtuous to remove. On the other hand, it worries that the argument ultimately traces this circle: It is wrong to fail to remove the creature because this failure would be blameworthy; and failure to remove would be blameworthy because wrong.
book reviews
18. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 12 > Issue: 1
Forrest Clingerman Janet Donohoe. Remembering Places: A Phenomenological Study of the Relationship Between Memory and Place
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19. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 12 > Issue: 1
David Kolb Martin Drenthen and Josef Keulartz, eds. Environmental Aesthetics: Crossing Divides and Breaking Ground
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20. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 12 > Issue: 1
Tim Christion Myers Dale Jamieson. Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed—And What it Means for Our Future
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