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Displaying: 1-20 of 27 documents


articles
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 17 > Issue: 2
Matthew Hall 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.
book reviews
7. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 17 > Issue: 2
Lauren Eichler Kelly A. Parker and Heather E. Keith, eds. Pragmatist and American Philosophical Perspectives on Resilience
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8. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 17 > Issue: 2
Gregory F. Tague Carlo Alvaro. Raw Veganism: The Philosophy of the Human Diet
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9. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 17 > Issue: 2
Parker Biehn David Wood. Reoccupy Earth: Notes Toward An Other Beginning
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10. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 17 > Issue: 2
Marin Lucio Mare Frédéric Neyrat. The Unconstructable Earth: An Ecology of Separation
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11. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 17 > Issue: 2
Marjolein Oele, Jacqueline Clement Corine Pelluchon. Nourishment: A Philosophy of the Political Body
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12. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 17 > Issue: 2
Kalpita Bhar Paul Ashish Kothari, Ariel Salleh, Arturo Escobar, Federico Demaria, Alberto Acosta, eds. Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary
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articles
13. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Tim Christion Climate Change and the Task of Thinking
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14. 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.
15. 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.
16. 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.
17. 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.
18. 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.
19. 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.
20. 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.