Already a subscriber? - Login here
Not yet a subscriber? - Subscribe here

Displaying: 1-10 of 10 documents


features
1. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 6 > Issue: 1
Leonard Lawlor Auto-Affection and Becoming (Part I): Who are We?
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
This essay pursues a double strategy to transform our human collective relation to animal life. On the one hand, and this strategy is due to Derrida’s thought, it attempts to criticize the belief that humans have a kind of subjectivity that is substantially different from that of animals, the belief that humans have in their self-relation (called auto-affection) a relation of pure self-presence. On the other hand, the essay attempts to enlarge the idea of auto-affection to include the voices and looks of animals in us. Being in us, the image of animal suffering changes who we are. Hence the subtitle. This second strategy is due to Deleuze’s (or more precisely Deleuze and Guattari’s) thought. In fact, a large portion of this essay is devoted to a conceptual reconstruction of Deleuze and Guattari’s important concept of becoming. I argue that there are two central features of this concept. First, the concept of becoming involves a process of desubjectification which allows for the image of animal suffering to inhabit our consciousness as a “feverish thought.” Second, the outcome of becoming is not only that, due to the feverish thought, we change, but also that we write about this experience in order to lead others to it. The essay ends therefore by invoking a kind of writing—folktales—as a way of calling for a “people to come” (Deleuze) or a “democracy to come” (Derrida).
2. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 6 > Issue: 1
Bryan E. Bannon Animals, Language, and Life: Searching for Animal Attunement with Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
This essay elaborates the meaning of Merleau-Ponty’s conception of life as “a power to invent the visible” by differentiating it from Heidegger’s claim, in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, that the essence of humanity is to be world-forming. By considering how history and language influence conceptions of life, the essay argues that the various forms of animal life are structurally similar to human life, while at the same time are different insofar as different species exhibit distinct ways of living their bodies. Thus, one can maintain a metaphysical continuity between different bodies, while ensuring their difference and specificity.
3. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 6 > Issue: 1
Jozef Keulartz Boundary Work in Ecological Restoration
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
Two protracted debates about the moral status of animals in ecological restoration projects are discussed that both testify to the troubling aspects of our inclination to think in terms of dualisms and dichotomies. These cases are more or less complementary: the first one is about the (re)introduction of species that were once pushed out of their native environment; the other one concerns the elimination or eradication of “exotic” and “alien” species that have invaded and degraded ecosystems. Both cases show the detrimental impact of dualistic thinking on ecological restoration projects. In the first case, communication and cooperation between stakeholders is frustrated by the opposition of zoocentrism and ecocentrism; in the second case the opposition of nativism and cosmopolitanism appears to be a major stumbling block for consensus building and conflict management. I will argue that “gradualization”—thinking in terms of degrees instead of boundaries—can offer a way out of this black-and-white thinking and can open up space for negotiation and deliberation among different and sometimes diverging perspectives.
4. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 6 > Issue: 1
Richard Evanoff A Coevolutionary Framework for Environmental Ethics
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
A coevolutionary approach to environmental ethics recognizes the extent to which cultural practices and natural processes interact with and coadapt themselves to each other, but also acknowledges the extent to which each preserves a measure of autonomy from the other. The paper begins by outlining a coevolutionary theory that sees nature and culture in transactional rather than in dualistic terms and by presenting a coevolutionary view of cultural adaptation. The paper then considers how a coevolutionary framework for ethics can be developed that sees human well-being and the environment as interrelated rather than as separate areas of ethical concern.
5. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 6 > Issue: 1
Isabelle Stengers, Taylor S. Hammer Toward a Speculative Approach to Biological Evolution
view |  rights & permissions | cited by
book reviews
6. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 6 > Issue: 1
Jonathan Parker Onto-Ethologies: The Animal Environments of Uexküll, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze
view |  rights & permissions | cited by
7. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 6 > Issue: 1
Nicolas de Warren Nature, Aesthetics, and Environmentalism: From Beauty to Duty
view |  rights & permissions | cited by
8. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 6 > Issue: 1
William Edelglass Philosophy and Animal Life
view |  rights & permissions | cited by
9. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 6 > Issue: 1
Peter Blair Heidegger and Homecoming: The Leitmotif in the Later Writings
view |  rights & permissions | cited by
10. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 6 > Issue: 1
Peter Heron An Ontology of Trash: The Disposable and its Problematic Nature
view |  rights & permissions | cited by