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Environmental Philosophy

Volume 17, Issue 1, Spring 2020
Climate Change and the Task of Thinking

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articles
1. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Tim Christion Climate Change and the Task of Thinking
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2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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).
10. 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.
11. 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.
book reviews
12. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Jonathan Beever Nicholas Shrubsole. What Has No Place, Remains: The Challenges for Indigenous Religious Freedom in Canada Today
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13. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Maximilian G. Hepach David W. Johnson. Watsuji on Nature: Japanese Philosophy in the Wake of Heidegger
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14. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Conrad Scott David Farrier. Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time, Sacrifice Zones, and Extinction
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15. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Jared L. Talley Steven Davis. In Defense of Public Lands: The Case against Privatization and Transfer
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