The discussion of the Anthropocene makes it clear that contemporary social thought can no longer take nature, or an external ‘environment’, for granted in political discussion. Humanity is remaking its own context very rapidly, not only in the processes of urbanization but also in the larger context of global biophysical transformations that provide various forms of insecurity. Disasters such as the Fukushima nuclear meltdowns and potentially disastrous plans to geoengineer the climate in coming decades highlight that the human environment (...) is being remade in the Anthropocene. Humanity is now a geological actor, not just a biological one, and that insight, captured in the term Anthropocene, changes understandings of both security and environment in social thought, requiring a focus on production of environments rather than their protection. Disasters help clarify this key point and its significance for considering geosocial formations. (shrink)

The Anthropocene, in which humankind has become a geological force, is a major scientific proposal; but it also means that the conceptions of the natural and social worlds on which sociology, political science, history, law, economics and philosophy rest are called into question. The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis captures some of the radical new thinking prompted by the arrival of the Anthropocene and opens up the social sciences and humanities to the profound meaning of the (...) new geological epoch, the 'Age of Humans'. Drawing on the expertise of world-recognised scholars and thought-provoking intellectuals, the book explores the challenges and difficult questions posed by the convergence of geological and human history to the foundational ideas of modern social science. If in the Anthropocene humans have become a force of nature, changing the functioning of the Earth system as volcanism and glacial cycles do, then it means the end of the idea of nature as no more than the inert backdrop to the drama of human affairs. It means the end of the 'social-only' understanding of human history and agency. These pillars of modernity are now destabilised. The scale and pace of the shifts occurring on Earth are beyond human experience and expose the anachronisms of 'Holocene thinking'. The book explores what kinds of narratives are emerging around the scientific idea of the new geological epoch, and what it means for the 'politics of unsustainability'. (shrink)

The topics of Anthropocene literature have a perceived global relevance that is greater than that of literature in any other period in history, and Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, and Paulo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl show this clearly. These books hit common global registers, at once dealing with issues such as urbanization, corporate capitalism, and climate change as common concerns while vigorously valuing and affirming cultural heterogeneity. The topics of these novels virtually guarantee their position (...) as world literature. Sinha, Mistry, and Bacigalupi offer hope rather than doom-and-gloom on topics that are of pressing global concern. In the process, they reveal that Anthropocene fiction has, by its very topicality, a propensity to being world literature, whatever the greatness or weakness of its national origin. Theorizing about world literature thus needs to grapple more decisively than it has with what cli-fi and Anthropocene fiction offer. (shrink)

The Anthropocene debates are rooted in epistemological differences. Geologists seek temporal markers of spatially even anthropogenic impact. Thus, they favor geologic data that fit this category. Humanists and social scientists, on the other hand, tend to focus on the negative effects of spatial unevenness. Without linking the Anthropocene’s temporal and spatial components, the official designation, ultimately determined by geologists, will be a futile exercise that will not make good on the Anthropocene Working Group’s intention for it to (...) be useful for wider segments of society. However, if the Anthropocene is divided into an Early, Middle, and Late Anthropocene, each defined by geologic evidence, the uneven spatial distributions of anthropogenic damage can be traced to specific events in human history, thus actualizing the predictive value of geology. Further, this diachronic scheme, unlike the synchronic ones thus far proposed, makes more legible two fundamental dynamics between human and natural trajectories: the intensification of global inequity coterminous with the intensification of natural damage; and humanity’s ever more audacious attempts to control the environment. This ethos, wielded as the prime justification for taking over that which belonged to cultures not espousing it, has resulted in anthropogenic damage disproportionately affecting the most economically and historically vulnerable peoples. However, their alternative modes of coping with the damages—an ineluctable responsiveness to, rather than control over, environment—enables them to survive. As such, they could lead the way through the Anthropocene, modeling adaptation and mitigation strategies, and obviating the global North’s unsound hope for a technological solution. Three metropolitan architects, Rem Koolhaas, David Adjaye, and V. Mitch McEwen, look to global Southern urbanisms––improvisational, creative, minimalist praxes grounded in indigenous lifeways––for alternate modes of inhabiting anthropocenic modernity. Likewise, New Zealand’s government has materially and ethically mitigated its legacy of settler colonialism by combining Western scientific data with indigenous knowledge to formulate more adaptive, responsive, integrative approaches to environment. By expanding the data beyond the stratigraphic, coordinated interdisciplinary research can measure variegated effects of––and responses to––the Anthropocene, thus better equipping humanity to adapt to and/or mitigate climate change and to eschew unsustainable practices. (shrink)

인류세(anthropocene)에 대한 논의는 지질학적, 사회학적, 인문학적 견지를 포괄한다. 특히 인간과 환경의 관계를 재정립한다는 점에서 인류세가 가진 윤리적 의의를 고찰할 필요가 있다. 인류세에서 지구 시스템에 가해지는 위기와 충격은 인간이 초래한 것이다. 그러므로 그것을 타개할 책임 역시 인간에게 있다. 우리는 이전의 인간지상주의와는 다른, 공존을 전제로 한 인간중심주의를 통해 인류와 지구 공동체 전체의 지속가능한 생존을 도모해야 한다. 타자의 고통을 고려하는 태도는 인류세 시대에 지속가능한 생존을 이루는 데 유효할 것이다.

In the humanities and social sciences, the concept of the Anthropocene has become the starting point for theoretical analyses of the immediate relationship between the environmental preconditions for the existence of civilization and the human actions whose consequences threaten these preconditions. From the philosophical-anthropological point of view, reflections on the concepts of the Anthropocene focus not only on a critical analysis of the claims about human that originate in the natural sciences but also on an understanding of the (...) overall role of humanity in the new geological-climatic regime of the Earth. The primary purpose of this paper is to highlight two-pronged problem areas, which include both the problem of anthropological constants as specific ways of makingstatements about humans and the problem of using them to reflect on the conceptual system of the Anthropocene. In particular, this paper emphasizes hypotheses and claims from the Anthropocene concept of Earth System Science that point to humans becoming a geobiophysical force in the Anthropocene. Three areas in which anthropological constants could be subsequently subjected to a deeper analysis are proposed. -------------------------- Received: 01/12/2022. Reviewed: 08/02/2023. Accepted: 30/03/2023. (shrink)

The recent Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggested that continuing inaction on climate change presents a significant threat to social stability. This book examines the reasons for the inaction highlighted by the IPCC and suggests the normative bases for overcoming it.

이 글은 먼저, ‘인류세’(Anthropocene)의 의미를 철학적으로 분석하고 이를 통해 기후변 화의 구조적 및 체계적 원인을 이해하는 데 집중한다. 다음으로, 인류세와 탄소 문명의 결 과로 나타난 기후변화에 대응하기 위한 윤리학의 과제를 제시한다. 이른바 ‘기후윤리 학’(Climate Ethics)의 주된 과제는 무엇보다 기후변화와 기후변화 완화 의무에 대한 회의 주의를 논박하는 것과 기존에 견지해온 우리의 윤리적 의식의 전환을 요청하는 것이다. 특히 기존의 윤리관은 현재 우리 곁에 살아있는 사람들 간의 관계에 배타적으로 치중해 있었 다. 그러나 기후변화 시대에 옳고 그름의 문제는 지금 현재 살아있는 인류와만 관계하는 (...) 게 아니라 미래 세대와도 관련된 문제, 즉 ‘세대 간 정의’(Intergenerational Justice)의 문 제로 고려되어야 한다. 또한 그것은 민족 국가 단위의 공동체 내부의 이익을 우선적으로 고려하는 것이 아니라 초국가적 단위에서, 즉 전지구적 차원에서 국제협약을 통해 대응전 략과 ‘공동의 차별화된 책임원칙’을 마련해야 하는 ‘전지구적 정의’(International Justice) 의 문제로 간주되어야 한다. (shrink)

The Anthropocene, understood from the perspective of the creators of Earth System Science and IPCC, calls for global governance, which tends to be understood as an epistocratic, technocratic affair leaving little room for reflective rationality and politics in the agonistic sense. Using the republican repertoire, I argue that global governance thus understood is actually the last thing we need. I suggest that global environmental institutions ought to be based on ‘constitutional republicanism’. Key elements of this approach are a Machiavellian (...) appreciation of discord, agonism and ‘the political’, combined with a realistic assessment of the very diverse interests at stake in global climate politics, hence very diverse ideas about the benefits and burdens of specific global environmental strategies; and institutions based on ideas uniquely developed by republicans from Machiavelli to Mouffe allowing for human and science’s fallibility on the one hand, irreducible moral and political diversity on the other. (shrink)

The idea of the Anthropocene postulates that, epistemically and ontologically, we must consider the climatic, geological, and biological systems of the Earth as essentially bound up with the technological systems that have been developed by human beings. This idea has been aesthetically configured through images of ‘Spaceship Earth’ and in the orbital pictures of light patterns emitted by human settlements across the globe. I will argue that this shift towards the idea of the Anthropocene is complicit with a (...) certain kind of technological messianism, which assumes that the most serious problems of global warming and environmental despoliation will be solved by future technologies. Furthermore the impact of this futural orientation, which includes the idea of transhumanist adaptations to the consequences of climate change, has been to intensify the nexus between technological innovation, neoliberal economics, and entrepreneurial heroism that has come to shape the collective imagination of the future. This, I will argue, has profound consequences for the way human beings orientate themselves to their ethical and political responsibilities in respect of climate change, human suffering, and cosmopolitan democracy. (shrink)

The participation of humanists, artists and social scientists has added much impetus to the study and story of the "anthropocene". Zhao Defa, the contemporary Chinese writer, is one of the pacesetters in this regard. His inspiration from the concept of the "anthropocene" transforms the body narrative in the novel The Anthropocene. This article argues that the changed triad of body narrative, or more specifically, the highly encoded bodily metaphors, the function of body in narrative and the relation (...) between nature and body, succeeds in modelling a body charged with ballooning desires in the "anthropocene", which constitutes the humanity's the existential basis and the very cause of the "anthropocene", and if not hurdled, will bring fatal catastrophe to this planet. (shrink)

Natural scientists have proposed that humankind has entered a new geologic epoch. Termed the “Anthropocene,” this new reality revolves around the central role of human activity in multiple Earth ecosystems. That challenge requires a rethinking of social science explanations of organization and environment relationships. In this article, we discuss the need to politicize institutional theory as a means understanding “Anthropocene Society,” and in turn what that resultant society means for the Anthropocene in the natural environment. We modify (...) the constitutive elements of institutional orders and a set of main change mechanisms to explore three scenarios around which future Anthropocene Societies might be built—Collapsing Systems, Market Rules, and Cultural Re-Enlightenment. Simultaneously, we use observations from the Anthropocene to expose limitations in present institutional theory and propose extensions to remedy them. Overall, this article challenges organizational scholars to consider a new paradigm under which research in environmental sustainability and social sustainability takes place. (shrink)

In modern times, philosophy finds itself in a contradictory position. On the one hand, it has long been a theoretical abstract knowledge of the phenomena of reality and the ideas that express it. On the other hand, it is, at its core, a science that reflects on changes in fundamental human values. Values are embedded in the structure of each society, in the variety of issues that it has to deal with. Therefore, to be in touch with changing reality, philosophy (...) naturally responds to societal issues that have a lasting impact on human beings and their environment. Being aware of the multi-layered nature of the Anthropocene, the author of the article explores the values that emerge in Lithuanian philosophy in the context of research on the Anthropocene. For this purpose, the insights of Lithuanian philosophers Naglis Kardelis, Gintautas Mažeikis, Arvydas Šliogeris, Mintautas Gutauskas and Danutė Bacevičiūtė into the most significant changes in nature caused by the Anthropocene are discussed. (shrink)

Abstract:Enlightenment era optimism that technological and educational developments offer a progressive path to plenty and liberation supports a hope that human toil may be progressively reduced. The Development Thesis defended by G. A. Cohen is a piece of that Enlightenment optimism. The Development Thesis holds that productive forces tend to develop throughout history. The tendency for such an increase in productive forces to occur is, according to Cohen’s argument, due to persistent facts about human nature. If Cohen is correct, there (...) is a tendency toward progress of an important sort, and this progress is due in significant part to human nature. But the development of productive forces also destroys nonhuman natural value. In the era of the Anthropocene this is occurring on a planetary scale. The simultaneous development and destruction entails that claims of progress must rely on an all-things-considered judgment. But due to the plurality of the relevant values, which cannot be compared according to a common metric, rational disagreement about the existence of progress and our progressive nature can be expected to persist. (shrink)

The view that we live in the Anthropocene is increasingly gaining currency across scientific disciplines. Especially in sociology this is said to require a paradigm shift in analysis and theory formation. This article argues that such a conclusion is premature. Owing to a scholastic fallacy – the uncritical transposition of the concept from the natural to the social sciences – Anthropocene lacks analytic clarity and explanatory power evidenced by: a normative overreach that erroneously imagines an idealised world citizenry (...) with collective action capacities; an obfuscation of the unequal distribution of ecological pathologies caused by capitalism; a normative indeterminacy concerning modes of redress; and an abstract ecological universalism offered as moral panacea. The article suggests that sociology needs to address the Anthropocene’s heterogeneity marked by contradictory regional interests and inequalities that neither appeals to social justice or ‘one humanity’ nor an escape into a dissolution of ontological differences between actors and artefacts can redeem. To that end, sociologists are asked to undertake a critical reconstruction of the concept. (shrink)

This is a book about how politics, government - and much else - needs to change in response to the transition from the Holocene to the Anthropocene, the emerging epoch of human-induced instability in the Earth system and its life-support capacities.

The proposal of the ‘Anthropocene’ as a new geological epoch where humans represent the dominant natural force has renewed artistic interest in the ‘geopoetic’, which is mobilized by cultural producers to incite changes in personal and collective participation in planetary life and politics. This article draws attention to prior engagements with the geophysical and the political: the work of Simone Weil and of the editors of the Martinican cultural journal Tropiques, Suzanne and Aimé Césaire. Synthesizing the political and scientific (...) shifts in human-world relationships of their time, both projects are set against oppressive or narcissistic materialisms and experiment with the image of the ‘cosmic’ to cultivate a preoccupation not (only) with a tangible materialism but with an intangible one that emphasizes process and connectivity across wide spatial and temporal scales. The writers’ movement between poetics and politics will be used to enquire what kind of socio-political work a contemporary geopoetic could potentially do. (shrink)

We are now entering the Anthropocene Epoch—so runs a recent enthusiastic claim. Humans can and ought go beyond the natural and powerfully engineer a better planet, managing for climate change and building new ecosystems for a more prosperous future. Perhaps the Anthropocene is inevitable. But: Rejoice? Accommodate? Accept it, alas? Perhaps the wiser, more ethical course is not so much going “beyond” the natural as “keeping the natural in symbiosis” with humans, maintaining a tapestry of cultural and natural (...) values, not a trajectory even further into the Anthropocene. Keep the urban, rural, and wild. Enter the Semi-Anthropocene! Basically Natural! Carefully! (shrink)

The Anthropocene crisis is frequently described as the rarefaction of resources or resources per capita. However, both energy and minerals correspond to fundamentally conserved quantities from the perspective of physics. A specific concept is required to understand the rarefaction of available resources. This concept, entropy, pertains to energy and matter configurations and not just to their sheer amount. However, the physics concept of entropy is insufficient to understand biological and social organizations. Biological phenomena display both historicity and systemic properties. (...) A biological organization, the ability of a specific living being to last over time, results from history, expresses itself by systemic properties, and may require generating novelties The concept of anti-entropy stems from the combination of these features. We propose that Anthropocene changes disrupt biological organizations by randomizing them, that is, decreasing anti-entropy. Moreover, second-order disruptions correspond to the decline of the ability to produce functional novelties, that is, to produce anti-entropy. (shrink)

In this article the author argues that we need not just to ‘decolonize’ the Anthropocene but also to ‘desecularize’ it – to be aware that in the new age of the Earth we may be coeval with gods and spirits. Drawing particularly on the work of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Georges Bataille, and using concepts from both thermodynamics and fluid dynamics, the author starts to develop an interdisciplinary theory of planetary spirit and use this to speak of both (...) the ‘laminar’ high gods of time that are being invoked to summon the story of Earth’s ongoing transformation into a canonical mythos, and the turbulent lower spirits of place which manifest particular, situated dynamics on an Earth crossed by interlocking gradients and flows of energy, value, power and entropy. He suggests that what might once have been distinct territorialized ‘cultures’ or ‘natures’ in which humans engaged in particular situated patterns of interaction with animals, spirits and other beings are increasingly being convened into a global multinatural system. (shrink)

For at least two centuries most social thought has taken the earth to be the stable platform upon which dynamic social processes play out. Both climate change and the Anthropocene thesis – with their enfolding of dramatic geologic change into the space-time of social life – are now provoking social thinkers into closer engagement with earth science. After revisiting the decisive influence of the late 18th-century notion of geological formations on the idea of social formations, this introductory article turns (...) to more recent and more explicit attempts to open up the categories of social thought to a deeper understanding of earth processes. This includes attempts to consider how social and political agency is both constrained and made possible by the forces of the earth itself. It also involves efforts to think beyond existing dependencies of social worlds upon particular geological strata and to imagine alternative ‘geosocial’ futures. (shrink)

In response to Larry Rasmussen's article about religious ethics in the Anthropocene, I offer an analysis that both contextualizes and elaborates upon his ideas. I introduce other humanities disciplines that have already wrestled with this question, and scholars of color whose voices offer needed correctives to the colonial heritage of most academic disciplines. I explore topics including human agency, non-human agency, exploitation, and refuge. I encourage scholars in our field to move beyond questions of responsibility and lamentations of moral (...) incompetence and into concepts of right relationality and analysis of grassroots climate action already taking place in religious, ethical contexts. (shrink)

In this article, I address and argue against the tendency to understand the anthropocene as inaugurating the end of nature. I conduct two key moves. First, by way of an engagement with the concept of anthropocene technology I explain how understanding the anthropocene as the end of nature prevents us from recognizing what the anthropocene is all about: interventionism. Secondly, I illustrate how a nondualist understanding of the human-nature relation allows us to recognize interventionism as the (...) hallmark of the anthropocene without falling back into the hierarchical human-nature conceptions that underlie interventionism. A nondualist framework that conserves the human-nature distinction helps us in our ability to relate critically to contemporary science and technology in the anthropocene. I illustrate the conceptual narrative of the article through the specific case of gene drive technology development. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IntroductionAnthropocene Feminisms: Rethinking the UnthinkableClaire Colebrook and Jami WeinsteinIn her recent lecture on the Anthropocene (to which she adds the Capitalocene and the Chthulucene), Donna Haraway expresses some alarm that after two major insights into what counts as thinkable, it was “anthropos” that became the term for the post-Holocene (Haraway 2014). Haraway declares, with emphasis, that it is “literally unthinkable” to work with the individual unit of “man” (...) if one is to do good intellectual work. For Haraway, the two knowledge events that ought to have precluded the use of the figure of the “anthropos” are: first, the acceptance that any seeming individual is the outcome of a series of complex relations and must be studied as such (so there would be no epoch with anything, let alone “man,” as its first cause), and, second, intellectual inquiry has acknowledged a general becoming-with, such that in order to be anything at all, “one” must be in a dynamic relation. Haraway’s work is exemplary of post-liberal feminist resistance to the figure of man—as subject, agent, and center of knowing. Terms like “Woman” or “the feminine” do not extend the field occupied by man; they instead create a different intensity. So when Haraway questions the “anthropos” of the Anthropocene she neither asks that women, too, be included in those who have scarred the planet, nor does she claim that “Woman” would occupy some innocent outside. Instead, she proposes that one think of the “anthropos” as untimely, as out of sync with an intellectual milieu that theorizes the death of the subject and the eclipse of the human, and has even begun to renounce the notion of life in itself. It is odd that in the face of this destruction of any possibility of thinking by [End Page 167] way of individualism, the epic gesture of the present deploys the figure of the “anthropos,” as it should be unthinkable today to return to the figure of man.When Haraway invokes what is literally unthinkable, and then gestures to the Anthropocene, she suggests that perhaps the figure of the Anthropocene is a form of unthinking, and that it is precisely when complexities, timescales, predictions, manageability, and any form of sustainability ought to disturb and trouble our logics that we cease to think and ask for a single cause for an entire epoch. If this is so, and the “anthropos” of the Anthropocene is a reaction formation, then we might see the skirmishes and turf wars that surround the golden spike1 as diversions. If we spend our time disputing just when it was that man started to change the planet, then we allow a contested point in time to pass itself off as thinking, all the while allowing the intensive multiplicity of what has come to be known as the Anthropocene to remain unthought. By asking when the Anthropocene began, we revive a modified version of the time of man; once again, man is placed as the agent of history, albeit unwittingly, and he can look back upon and assess the past of his own making. Haraway is not alone in suggesting that such conceptions of a single line of time, and a conception of first cause, are highly gendered and racialized. The figure of “man” who creates his own history and recognizes himself as having come into being through a time that is readable is bound up with hegemonic conceptions of modernity, and has long been the target of feminist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial critique (e.g., Foucault 1970; Amin 1989; Grosz 2004). If it is literally unthinkable to do good work from the premises of a methodological individualism, then asking who or what caused the Anthropocene, or when it began, would amount to a form of un-thinking or not-thinking. At the same time, perhaps the Anthropocene is literally unthinkable in a sense that marks a more positive and profound absurdity. Let us accept, following Haraway, that all “good work” both acknowledges the impossibility of accounting for the complexity of life by way of bounded, individual singularity, and dispenses with the exceptional man of reason as its foundation. If we do, what the Anthropocene... (shrink)

On 29 August 2016 the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG), headed by geologist Jan Zalasiewicz from the University of Leicester, officially presented its recommendation concerning the declaration of a...

The dominant current in the contemporary environmental movement fails to make the connection between the preservation of the environment and the survival of humans. The fashionable concept of the “Anthropocene” is not fully adequate to get to grips with the full gravity of the situation. Contemporary human society, based on a neo-liberal market economy, is “locked in” to a productivist mode of existence, so that it will be extremely difficult to abandon the goal of “growth” and to achieve a (...) sustainable relationship with the eco-system on which human existence depends. The “TAC” thesis, that “Technology is Anthropologically Constitutive,” has a dark side: technology may be anthropologically destructive. (shrink)

Some proponents of the Anthropocene argue that it is time adopt a future-oriented outlook: natural baselines no longer matter, and humans should remake the planet for the better. This raises questions about whose vision should guide such remaking, and whether the past deserves any consideration in adapting for the future. I argue that the past remains relevant, because the natural, cultural, and social worlds people enter into – shaped by those who came before us – matter. On this view, (...) there are reasons to value ‘nature’, even in a human-altered world, and climate adaptation should take that into account. (shrink)

This essay explores three deconstructive concepts – archive, anthropocene, and auto-affection – across two registers. The first is the register of what counts as readability in general, beyond reading in its narrow and actualized sense.. The second register applies to Derrida today, and what it means to read the corpus of a philosopher and how that corpus is governed by proper names. I want to suggest that the way we approach proper names in philosophy and theory is part of (...) a broader problem of our relation to what it is to read, and how readability intertwines with the human. (shrink)

The paper discusses some difficulties that life in Anthropocene poses to our ethical thinking. It describes the sort of ethical task that individuals find themselves confronting when dealing with the planetary environmental quandaries that characterise the new epoch. It then asks what, given the situation, would count as environmentally virtuous ways of looking at and going about our lives, and how relevant virtues can be developed. It is argued that the practice of gardening is distinctively conducive to that objective. (...) Finally, some garden virtues that will be of special importance in the Anthropocene, but have so far been largely neglected by environmental ethicists, are listed and described. (shrink)

In the Parthenon frieze, the time of mortals and the time of gods seem to merge. Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued that with the advent of the Anthropocene the times of human history and of the Earth are similarly coming together. Are humans entering the ‘monumental time’ of the Earth, to stand alongside the Olympian gods of the other geological forces? This article first looks at the cultural shifts leading to the modern idea of separate human and Earth histories. It (...) examines the changing use of monuments to mediate between human and other temporalities. It explores the use of ‘stratigraphic sections’ as natural monuments to mark transitions between the major time units of Earth history, and the erection of intentional monuments nearby. It suggests that the Anthropocene, as a geological epoch-in-the-making, may challenge the whole system of monumental semiotics used to stabilize our way of thinking about deep time. (shrink)

This essay interprets Schelling's positive philosophy as an effort to conceive nature as a gift. Schelling ruminated throughout his career on the paradoxical relation between humanity and nature that is expressed in the contemporary term “Anthropocene,” but this essay argues that Schelling's most productive response to this paradox can be found in his reflections on how to receive the gift of nature. After laying out the project of positive philosophy, the essay first explores Schelling's effort to conceive nature as (...) a gift in On the World-Soul, and then considers how this project founders in the First Projection of a System of Nature Philosophy. After the resources of the natural sciences showed themselves to be inadequate to the task of conceiving nature as a gift, Schelling returned to mythology in his late philosophy, and the concluding section of this essay traces how an often overlooked Epicurean strain in Schelling's late philosophy can help us see what is entailed in conceiving nature as a gift. (shrink)

This paper aims to discuss human experience in the Anthropocene geological era based on contemporary social theorists as Žižek and Badiou. I propose that, in face of the environmental crisis, techno-ecological corporative style sustainability is a perverse response; and this circuit can only be broken by a radical version of environmentalism that antagonizes the hegemonic discourse of our production-and-consumption system – emphasizing politics. The paper is divided into four parts where: a) the term Anthropocene, created by Paul Crutzen (...) among others, is described as the configuration of an era when biosphere disappears as an externality and becomes subordinated to the ensemble of knowledge and powers of liberal-capitalism; b) based on Alain Badiou, I describe the subject as resulting from an event’s truth progressing as fidelity; and the fact that not even the vision of environmental death have had the power to create new environmentalist subjects in place of consumer subjects; c) I analyze the perverse structure of denial that shows the reverse of the hole made positive - namely the appearing of techno-ecological products inviting us to enjoy a qualified consumption as the positived reverse of the environmental crisis; d) finally, after a brief comment about the currents which fight for hegemony in the discursive field of environmentalism, I discuss how the radical ecologism proposes to break the perverse circuit of techno-efficient sustainability by means of the political antagonism. (shrink)

The Anthropocene overthrows classical dichotomies like technology and nature and a new class of beings emerges: hybrids. The transitive status of hybrids - which establishes an extra, separate, 'third' ontological category, going beyond the dichotomy between nature and technology - constitutes a significant problem for environmental philosophy and philosophy of technology since they traditionally focus on either 'nature' (natural entities) or 'artefacts' (technological objects). In order to reflect on the ethical significance of hybrids, a classification of different types of (...) hybrids is required. Such a classification is provided by this article, based on insights from both environmental philosophy and philosophy of technology. After explaining why a new class of beings emerges in the Anthropocene, and reflecting on the one-sidedness of philosophy of technology and environmental philosophy in their focus on either technology or nature, we propose a new classification of hybrids in this article that provides a new starting point for reflections on the moral significance of hybrids in environmental philosophy and philosophy of technology. (shrink)

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 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. (shrink)

The Anthropocene is a radical reconceptualisation of the relationship between humanity and nature. It posits that we have entered a new geological epoch in which the human species is now the dominant Earth-shaping force, and it is rapidly gaining traction in both the natural and social sciences. This article critically explores the scientific representation of the concept and argues that the Anthropocene is less a scientific concept than the ideational underpinning for a particular worldview. It is paradigm dressed (...) as epoch. In particular, it normalises a certain portion of humanity as the ‘human’ of the Anthropocene, reinserting ‘man’ into nature only to re-elevate ‘him’ above it. This move promotes instrumental reason. It implies that humanity and its planet are in an exceptional state, explicitly invoking the idea of planetary management and legitimising major interventions into the workings of the earth, such as geoen-gineering. I conclude that the scientific origins of the term have diminished its radical potential, and ask whether the concept's radical core can be retrieved. (shrink)

Living in Anthropocene times entails living in relation to two seemingly separate temporalities – the microtime of digital operations and the deep time of geological upheaval. Though divergent, these temporalities are united by their unavailability to perception; microtime proceeds too fast to perceive directly, while deep time is too vast to apprehend. Taking these temporalities as a point of departure, this paper develops three arguments. First, it asserts that the temporalities of deep time and microtime increasingly impact contemporary existence, (...) complicating familiar categorizations of temporal experience. Second, it argues that these ostensibly separate temporalities are ontologically connected through the operations of the tech industry, which is constructing a microtemporal system that extracts the planet’s deep time resources to delimit the future both materially and cognitively. Third, it suggests that Silicon Valley legitimizes these processes by funding the philosophy of longtermism, which appeals to distant timescales to marginalize injustices in the present. (shrink)

Earth system science (ESS) and modelling have given rise to a new conceptual framework in the recent decades, which goes much beyond climate science. Indeed, Earth system science and modelling have the ambition “to build a unified understanding of the Earth”, involving not only the physical Earth system components (atmosphere, cryosphere, land, ocean, lithosphere) but also all the relevant human and social processes interacting with them. This unified understanding that ESS aims to achieve raises a number of epistemological issues about (...) interdisciplinarity. We argue that the interdisciplinary relations in ESS between natural and social / human sciences are best characterized in terms of what is called ‘scientific imperialism’ in the literature and we show that this imperialistic feature has some detrimental epistemic and non-epistemic effects, notably when addressing the issue of values in ESS. This paper considers in particular the core ESS concepts of Anthropocene, planetary boundaries and tipping points in the light of the philosophy of science discussions on interdisciplinarity and values. We show that acknowledging the interconnections between interdisciplinarity and values suggests ways for ESS to move forward in view of addressing the climate and environmental challenges. (shrink)

The Anthropocene, as a geological and biological fact, is a baroque moment insofar as it is the meeting with an uncertain outcome between two irreconcilable truths. The truth hitherto considered as such, classic, is put in doubt by another truth, without this one being able to impose itself. The awareness of this confrontation, irreconcilable for the moment, favors in the human species a spectacular and rhetorical political action, that is to say baroque.

While many writers have advocated the importance of narrative as a means of engaging with the problem of extinction, this paper considers what the qualities of visual aesthetics bring to this field. In addressing this question, the discussion turns to the problem of the ethical limits of art raised by Adorno and takes a theoretical turn away from posthumanism to consider how visual responses can redirect attention back to human agency. The focus of visual analysis is on five paintings by (...) the contemporary Iranian artist Naeemeh Naeemaei. Neither exclusively Western nor overtly internationalist in their approach, these artworks refer to the effects of both hunting and the erosion of trans-national habitats as causes of extinction, yet they also show how human affective responses to extinction can extend across geo-political borders to a more global imaginary. As such, Naeemaei’s artworks are regarded as a form of immanent critique of anthropogenic forcing. Her works adapt older traditions in Persian humanism and art to show not only how the human dominion of nonhuman animals has led to extinction, but also how this leads to an almost incalculable sense of human loss. I argue that Naeemaei’s affective imagery of loss is not simply yet another example of how the lifeworld of animals can only be understood from an anthropocentric worldview, but instead points to our inability to yet fully register the immeasurable losses of extinction and what this yet unchartered grief might imply for potential human agency. (shrink)

The present reflection draws upon a tradition of energetic, world-facing critical legal scholarship to interrogate the anthropos assumed by the terminology of ‘anthropocentrism’ and of the ‘Anthropocene’. The article concludes that any ethically responsible future engagement with ‘anthropocentrism’ and/or with the ‘Anthropocene’ must explicitly engage with the oppressive hierarchical structure of the anthropos itself—and should directly address its apotheosis in the corporate juridical subject that dominates the entire globalised order of the Anthropocene age.

Abstract:In the past twenty years, the Anthropocene debate in the humanities and social sciences has focused on two basic approaches concerning the rise and challenge of anthropogenic climate change. The former critically addresses the socio-political underbelly of the re-centering of the human species as a geological force as proposed by the natural sciences through the guiding question: Who is the Anthropos? The latter examines the ethical challenges we face in the wake of deep timespans and fragmented agencies. This article (...) presents the upshots of this ongoing debate and suggests an ontological framework of distributed identities between different conceptual horizons of humanoid formations between the 'Anthropos' (plurality as a single whole) and what I call 'anthropo(i)s' (singulars within plural wholes) to address the tension between individual responsibility (not everyone is equally guilty) and agential response-ability (humans, not tortoises, caused climate change). (shrink)

The Anthropocene is built on complex technological systems that span the globe. Historians of science have done much to document the emergence of this “technosphere.” Yet more interdisciplinary and regionally diverse approaches are needed to understand the complexity and unpredictability of the technosphere in our Anthropocene times. Rather than assuming a single planetary phenomenon, this essay emphasizes the widely varied lived experiences of the Anthropocene. Taking industrialized mining and oil drilling as examples of the technosphere, it examines (...) three African localities of resource extraction—the Congolese Copperbelt, the South African Witwatersrand, and the Niger Delta in Nigeria—to ask why the environmental transformations of large-scale industry have caused violent protest in one locality but apparent acquiescence in others. The concept of the Anthropocene urges historians of science to connect questions about scientific knowledge and technology to issues of environmental change, economic organization, political power, social differentiation, and cultural imagination. This broad approach, the essay suggests, can prove extremely fruitful in explaining historical variations and contemporary responses to the Anthropocene. (shrink)

The article has two aims. First, it provides a view of why the standard liberal-democratic political theory is unfit for the Anthropocene. Then, it defends two claims: that the fittest politics for the Anthropocene is to be fully non-anthropocentric and that the best model of a non-anthropocentric political theory is to be grounded in the notion of ‘ecological citizenship’, which can be easily extended to non-human living beings and even to non-living objects, such as ecosystems. The latter claim (...) is defended by endorsing and enlarging Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka’s views of animal citizenship rights and by putting forward a view of the Anthropocene as an age of massive domestication of non-human nature. (shrink)

Noting a lack of consensus in the recent literature on the Anthropocene, this article considers how social anthropologists might contribute to its theorizing and dating. Empirically it draws on the author’s long-term fieldwork in Hungary. It is argued that ethnographic methods are essential for grasping subjectivities, including temporal orientations and perceptions of epochal transformation. When it comes to historical periodization, however, ethnography is obviously insufficient and proposals privileging the last half-century, or just the last quarter of a century, seem (...) inadequate. Influential theories, which define ‘modernity’ in terms of developments emanating from the countries of the North Atlantic in the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries (Gellner, Polanyi, Wolf), remain partial and Eurocentric. To comprehend the social preconditions of the Anthropocene in a holistic fashion (the crucial contribution of comparative anthropology), it is necessary to follow Jack Goody and trace how the urban revolutions of the Bronze Age united Eurasia through the diffusion of new forms of economy, polity and cosmology. (shrink)

Geologists propose the term Anthropocene to reflect the dramatic changes that humans have made to the planet. While scientists pursue the reality of our current epoch, technology and media create an increasingly spectacular narrative surrounding environmental events. I look to critiques from Guy Debord and other media theorists as well as Patrick Modiano’s In the Café of Lost Youth to outline modes of détournement and resistance to an increasingly mediated world. Contemporary environmental aesthetics must face the challenge of critiquing (...) technological immersion even while making use of these very same technologies to reveal material and affective connections between humans and the environment. (shrink)

The idea that we are living in the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch defined by human activity, has gained substantial currency across the academy and with the broader public. Within the earth sciences, however, the question of the Anthropocene is hotly debated, recognized as a question that gets at both the foundations of geological science and issues of broad philosophical importance. For example, official recognition of the Anthropocene requires us to find a way to use the methods (...) of historical science to make predictions. It also involves determining the role that political motivations should play in establishing scientific kinds. I bring the perspective of philosophy of science to bear on these questions, ultimately arguing that formal recognition of the Anthropocene should be indefinitely deferred. 1A New Epoch 1.1Criteria for designating a new epoch2The Future Geologist’s Perspective 2.1Climate change2.2The fossil record, excluding humans2.3The human fossil record2.4Direct anthropogenic deposits2.5Chemical markers2.6Hydrology2.7Summing up3The Synchronic Perspective4The Anthropocene Is Not yet Set in Stone. (shrink)