Humans naturally and effortlessly use a set of cognitive tools to reason about biological entities and phenomena. Two such tools, essentialist thinking and teleological thinking, appear to be early developmental cognitive defaults, used extensively in childhood and under limited circumstances in adulthood, but prone to reemerge under time pressure or cognitive load. We examine the nature of another such tool: anthropocentric thinking. In four experiments, we examined patterns of property attribution to a wide range of living (...) and non-living objects, manipulating time pressure, response type, and property in a total of 471 participants. Results showed no tendency toward increased similarity-based attribution patterns indicative of anthropocentric thinking under time pressure. However, anthropocentric thinking was consistently observed for unfamiliar properties. These findings suggest that anthropocentric thinking is not a developmentally persistent cognitive default, but rather a cognitive strategy deliberately employed in situations of uncertainty. (shrink)

People frequently see design in nature that reflects intuitive teleological thinking– that is, the order in nature that supports life suggests it was designed for that purpose. This research proposes that inferences are stronger when nature supports human life in particular. Five studies (total N = 1788) examine evidence for an anthro-teleological bias. People agreed more with design statements framed to aid humans (e.g., “trees produce oxygen so that humans can breathe”) than the same statements framed to aid other (...) targets (“trees produce oxygen so that leopards can breathe”). The bias was greatest when advantages for humans were well-known and salient (e.g., the ozone layer) and decreased when advantages for other targets were made explicit. The bias was not eliminated by highlighting the benefits for other species, however, and emerged spontaneously for novel phenomena (Jupiter’s gravity protects Earth from asteroids). We conclude that anthropocentric biases enhance existing teleological biases to see stronger design in phenomena where it enables human survival. (shrink)

Professional environmental ethics arose directly out of the interest in the environment created by Earth Day in 1970. At that time many environmentalists, primarily because they had read Aldo Leopold’s essay, “The Land Ethic,” were convinced that the foundations of environmental problems were philosophical. Moreover, these environmentalists were dissatisfied with the instrumental arguments based on human use and benefit—which they felt compelled to invoke in defense of nature—because they thought these arguments were part of the problem. Wanting to counter instrumental (...) arguments in some way with non- or even anti-instrumental arguments, and unable to think of anything else to say, they began wistfully suggesting that perhaps nature had or ought to have rights. When professional environmental ethics came into its own in the early 1980s, rights for nature were one of the first subjects to be debated in detail. Unfortunately, however, no one could come up with a theory to support such rights attributions. Nevertheless, because rights had been invoked by environmentalists to challenge the preeminent role of instrumental value arguments, and because the field of environmental ethics developed in support of environmental concerns and arguments, environmental ethicists turned to an examination of noninstrumental or intrinsic value arguments for the preservation of nature. (shrink)

MacIntyre, Clark, and Heidegger would all agree that the current problem with moral theory is its lack of a satisfactory conception of human telos. This lack leads us to resort to such fictions as rights, interests, and utility, which are “disguises for the will to power.” Ibid., p. 240. These thinkers would also agree that modern nation-states are cut off from the roots of the Western tradition. Modern political economy, with “its individualism, its acquisitiveness and its elevation of the values (...) of the market to a central social place”Ibid., p. 237. is leading us into “the coming age of barbarism and darkness.”Ibid., p. 244. MacIntyre's grim depiction of the future, which Heidegger calls “the time of the darkening of the earth” and “the flight of the gods”,Heidegger, “What Are Poets For?” in Poetry, Language, Thought. can only be met by re-appropriating our own tradition. Although Aristotle has much to tell us, I believe Heidegger is right to turn to Heraclitus for a non-anthropocentric conception of humanity's place in Nature. Other writers, however, such as Arne Naess, George Sessions, and Stuart Hampshire, argue that the writings of Spinoza may offer the most helpful vision of humanity needed to guide our efforts to find a more appropriate basis for our behavior toward each other and toward the non-human world as well.George Sessions, “Spinoza and Jeffets on Man in Nature,” Inquiry 20 (1977):481–528. Sessions' essay was criticized by Genevieve Lloyd in “Spinoza's Environmental Ethics,” Inquiry 23 (1980):293–311. In reply, Arne Naess wrote “Environmental Ethics and Spinoza's Ethics: Comments on Genevieve Lloyd's Article,” Inquiry 23 (1980):313~ 325. Cf. also Stuart Hampshire, Two Theories of Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). Yet Aristotle, Qark, Heidegger, Heraclitus, Maclntyre, and Spinoza all agree that in order to behave fittingly, we must understand what it means to be human. At this time, I would like to acknowledge the importance of the following objection to what I have been arguing here: While it may be true that the concept of human rights is a fiction, it is nevertheless a very useful fiction for changing how human beings relate to each other. Tom Regan has frequently pointed out that even if the concept of rights proves to be ficticious, it can be helpful in protecting non-human beings from abuse by humans. Cf. his essay “Exploring the Idea of Animal Rights,” Animals' Rights - A Symposium (Sussex and London: Centaur Press Ltd., 1979); Regan, “Animal Rights, Human Wrongs,” Environmental Ethics 2 (1980):99–120. The doctrine of the rights of man justified the American and French revolutions, which brought forth new and important human freedoms. Today, most of humanity still lacks the protection afforded by constitutionally guaranteed human rights. Moreover, even in constitutional democracies there are frequent abuses of and attempts to curtail human rights. Until far more people become committed to protecting human rights, it is unlikely that there will be a big movement to extend rights to non-human beings, much less to overcome the anthropocentrism inherent in the concept of rights. What the Buddhist tradition calls “skillful means” is appropriate in our current situation.My thanks to Professor David Levin of Northwestern University for having reminded me of the importance of approaching the question of human rights in a “skillful” way. We must approach people in a way sensitive to their current self-understanding. Before we can pass on to the stage of planetary unity made possible by non-anthropocentric thinking, we need to find ways that promote mutual respect among human beings.On the topic of the relation between spiritual-psychological growth and the shift in human morality, cf. M.W. Fox, “Animal Rights and Nature Liberation,” in Animals' Rights - A Symposium. Out of such respect there can also arise respect for the non-human as well. While largely in agreement with this point of view, I would like to note that our means must be very skillful, indeed, if we are to transform our relationships to each other and to the natural world before irreparable damage is done to the earth, through nuclear war or environmental destruction. The time grows short for the transformation needed to bring us from the stage of anthropocentrism to a deeper awareness of our internal relationship to the whole world. Some people, such as Peter Russell, argue that we are witnessing the evolution of a non-anthropocentric mode of planetary consciousness that will be supported by the revolution in communications and computers. Peter Russel, The Global Brain: Speculations on the Evolutionary Leap tp Planetary Consciousness (New York: J.P. Tarcher, 1983). Other people, such as Jeremy Rifkin, maintain that the coming computer age promises ever greater intrusions into natural processes, such as the drive for control of genetic structures.Jeremy Rifkin, Algeny (New York: Viking, 1983). In my view, while it is important to extend the idea of human rights wherever possible, it is also crucial that we consider seriously the possibility that the idea of human rights is merely a transitional way of conceiving of morality. As we learn more about the interrelationship of human life with all other aspects of the earth's life, our self-understanding will no longer be in harmony with the human-centered morality we know today. We will either learn to respect all beings and act toward them in appropriate ways, or else we will continue down the road we are now headed - a road which seems to have a very disturbing destination. Learning to dwell appropriately on earth is the most pressing moral issue of the day. (shrink)

Over the past six decades, Antarctic Treaty Consultative Parties have developed legal agreements to protect various aspects of the Antarctic environment. Strong anthropocentrism (e.g., unsustainable harvesting of marine living resources) is generally rejected, and stewardship (e.g., minimizing risks of contamination) is accepted while protection of nonanthropocentric values (e.g., wilderness and intrinsic values) is evoked when it furthers human interests. As one of the world’s remaining large wildernesses, Antarctica is under threat from the continuous expansion of the human footprint and is (...) in need of attention from the wider society, including the environmental ethics community. The interdependence of all life on this planet means that problems in Antarctica are not as far away and trivial as it may seem. Furthermore, Antarctica’s extreme position at the edge of civilization challenges humans as moral agents to think about where our moral duties and rights begin and end on this planet, and elsewhere in the universe. Considerations of wilderness and intrinsic values, equity, and abiotic ethics are some of the issues that environmental ethics can contribute toward the protection of the Antarctic wilderness. (shrink)

In Of Spirit, Jacques Derrida claims that Heidegger's attempted deconstruction of metaphysical anthropocentrism remains anthropocentric and, as such, is inherently authoritarian. This paper takes up these charges to engage with whether Derrida is justified in coming to this conclusion. To do so, it briefly outlines Heidegger's critique of anthropocentrism and subsequent re-thinking of human being in line with the question of being, before suggesting that Derrida is correct to suggest that Heidegger's thinking remains anthropocentric. It then (...) engages with whether Heidegger's defence of this continued anthropocentrism is authoritarian by engaging with the nature of what it is to be authoritarian. By engaging with three senses of authoritarianism, termed authoritarian in the sense of the author, sovereign, and dogmatic, it suggests that, while Heidegger can indeed be thought of as being authoritarian in the senses of the author and sovereign so too can Derrida, and, indeed, by pointing to passages whereby Derrida links the sovereign author to democracy, I show that, on Derrida's terms, it is possible to conclude that Heidegger's thinking is inherently democratic. I then engage with the third sense of authoritarian, authoritarian in the sense of the dogmatic, and by discussing the relationship between being and time, the nature of provisionality in Heidegger's thinking, highlighting a number of statements he makes on animality that confirm this provisionality, and pointing to the openness inherent to meditative thinking, conclude that, while Derrida is correct to maintain that Heidegger's thinking is anthropocentric and can be thought of as being authoritarian in the senses of authorship and sovereignty, it is not authoritarian in the sense of the dogmatic. (shrink)

The book contains the first part of an investigation aimed at finding out why it is morally wrong to cause species to go extinct. That it is morally wrong seems to be a very basic and widely held intuition. It seems reasonable that a moral theory worth taking seriously ought to be able to account for that intuition. The most common attempt to answer our question is to refer to the instrumental value of the species for human beings – the (...) anthropocentric instrumental approach as I have chosen to call it. This is the answer that is discussed in this book. We have found many ways in which different species have instrumental value for human beings – both individually and as a part of ecosystems and of biodiversity in general. We could not guarantee however that this includes all species. In some cases, it also turned out that the instrumental value of the species in fact favours exploitation maybe even as far to the extinction of the species. We also noticed that there is no guarantee that the instrumental value of the species can always outweigh the competing values that we would gain by different encroachments that contribute to the extinction of the species. We found however that there are some special circumstances that help push the scale in the direction of preservation. I am thinking of some particular types of value such as choice value and transformation value – values that in general seem to favour preservation of species. This principle shows us that it would be rational from an anthropocentric instrumental vantage point to rule in favour of preservation in many of the cases where we are uncertain about the value of the species, about the best way of utilising the value, or about the connection between the species and other species or biodiversity in general. I am finally thinking of the moral principle that we have duties to consider the future interests of generations to come. We found that with a few exceptions it is justified to adopt such a principle. This in combination with the principles of precaution ought in general to urge us not to cause the extinction of species unless we have very trustworthy evidence that they will not turn out to be more valuable alive to future generations in comparison to what we can get from driving them to extinction. In relation to the discussion about the value of other species for human beings, it is worth noticing that all the arguments we have found in favour of preservation would be even stronger – and therefore account even better for the intuition that it is at least prima facie wrong to cause extinction – if we also accepted that other entities than human beings can have moral standing. Finally, we noticed that our moral intuitions strongly indicate that even in the cases where the instrumental value of other species for human beings talks in favour of preservation, there is still something lacking. Something we have to account for in order to totally account for our moral intuition against extinction. The conclusion will have to be that anthropocentric instrumentalism is in favour of preservation in many cases – probably in more cases than is generally acknowledged – but that it is not enough to give a complete account of the intuition that it is prima facie morally wrong to contribute to the extinction of species. We therefore have to continue our search for such an account. (shrink)

This article aims to add a further perspective to the discussion of the relationship between film and ethics. This perspective is important in today’s context, as the omnipresence of digital and mobile audiovisual images in everyday life increasingly determines our thinking and behaviour. However, there is a lack of appropriate critical reflection and ethical understanding of these images and their ontology. This article proposes a machine ethics of film from a film-philosophical perspective. Such an ethics draws on critical posthumanism, (...) namely on Karen Barad’s “ethics of mattering”, which explicitly relates to Emmanuel Levinas’ philosophy of the Other and their death. Thereby, special attention is given to the ontological nexus of film and death, as well as to the idea of film’s spectrality (drawing on, e.g., Derrida, Barthes, and Leutrat), a context that is discussed along with Barad’s diffractive view on quantum entanglement. Following from the author’s earlier approaches to Barad’s agential realism in the context of film-philosophy and certain Heidegger-based arguments set out in earlier writings about film and death, this article introduces the figure of what is called the “machinic spectre of film”. From here, the outline of a possible spectral ethics of film is considered by giving reasons for the exploration of further questions. (shrink)

As is often the case when scientific or engineering fields emerge, new concepts are forged or old ones are adapted. When this happens, various arguments rage over what ultimately turns out to be conceptual misunderstandings. At that critical time, there is a need for an explicit reflection on the meaning of the concepts that define the field. In this position paper, we aim to provide a reasoned framework in which to think about various issues in the field of distributed cognition. (...) We argue that both relevant concepts, distribution and cognition, must be understood as continuous. As it is used in the context of distributed cognition, the concept of distribution is essentially fuzzy, and we will link it to the notion of emergence of system-level properties. The concept of cognition must also be seen as fuzzy, but for a different reason: due to its origin as an anthropocentric concept, no one has a clear handle on its meaning in a distributed setting. As the proposed framework forms a space, we then explore its geography and visit famous landmarks. (shrink)

Human-Plant Entanglement: Thinking with Plants in the Anthropocene is an edited collection that redefines the boundaries of phytocentric scholarship. By foregrounding the question of the Anthropocene at the centre of plant studies, this book illustrates how attentiveness to plant life can allow our habitual anthropocentric/instrumental assumptions to be invaded by a unique 'phytocentric' impression that presents a new ethical imaginary for a human-plant relationship. With twelve carefully argued essays, this book sets a new benchmark in the field of (...) Critical Plant Studies. (shrink)

Human activity is now having a defining influence on global systems. The Anthropocene epoch requires revisiting our ethical presuppositions to understand our relationship to the earth's life support systems. The Land Ethic of Aldo Leopold proposes an ethic that is diachronic, holistic, and biocentric, in contrast to the synchronic, individualist, and anthropocentric axioms of mainstream bioethics. I argue that these features of the Land Ethic make it more suitable to engage with the ethics of healthcare resource allocation in the (...) Anthropocene; that understanding sustainability in a Land Ethical fashion requires that we view it as placing a side‐constraint on all permissible healthcare resource use such that this use remains within planetary boundaries; and outline how this might re‐shape debates around healthcare resource allocation. (shrink)

This article introduces the unique Asian film technique of the “empty shot” from the perspective of Chinese philosophical thought and aesthetics. In Chinese cinema, the “empty shot” is understood as a shot comprised of nonhuman subjects, distinct from both the establishing shot and the cutaway. Perhaps due to the lack of understanding of its philosophical grounding, the “empty shot” has not received much attention in Anglophone film studies, and has been criticized as an overgeneralised concept. This article first relates the (...) “empty shot” to the more widely accepted “pillow shot” in Anglophone studies of Japanese cinema. This article aims to make visible a non-anthropocentric worldview conveyed through the “empty shot”, and to make space for the potentialities of this film device, which may also be found in non-Chinese cinemas. It explains the “empty shot”’s central features: firstly, its visible scenes are imbued with invisible emotion, leaving space for the audience to feel what the characters are feeling. Second, it facilitates the generation of qi or “air” in a film, indicating the circulation of qi in a process of dynamic transformation between “actual” and “virtual”. Thirdly, the “empty shot” communicates with the audience, allowing them to more fully experience natural scenery and to encounter other beings while suspending everyday experiences, existing biases, and the separation between self and other. (shrink)

This article considers film as a form of artificial intelligence (AI). This non-anthropocentric hypothesis was first formulated in 1946 by filmmaker and theorist Jean Epstein and regards film as the thinking performance of a technical apparatus, the cinematograph, which is a manifestation of machine thinking based on the holistic entanglement of thought and world, film and philosophy. The article pursues an enquiry into ‘thinking’: one of the most prominent and oldest topics considered in philosophy, and also (...) essential to art and film. Thinking is not only characterised as a sense (like sight or taste) but as a creative and, ultimately, intra-active act. The possibility of film as AI is approached not only from a Deleuzian angle, long appraised by film-philosophy, but also through questions recently raised by theories of artistic research and the speculative-materialist turn in contemporary philosophy. The latter have as a common denominator a strong critique of anthropocentrism in Western philosophy; the article enquires into this criticism from different angles and applies it to the main hypothesis of this analysis – to regard film as a form of AI. (shrink)

Reality exists independently of human observers, but does the same apply to its structure? Realist ontologies usually assume so: according to them, the world consists of objects, these have properties and enter into relations with each other, more or less as we are accustomed to think of them. Against this view, Rein Raud develops a radical process ontology that does not credit any vantage point, any scale or speed of being, any range of cognitive faculties with the privilege to judge (...) how the world ‘really’ is. In his view, what we think of as objects are recast as fields of constitutive tensions, cross-sections of processes, never in complete balance but always striving for it and always reconfiguring themselves accordingly. The human self is also understood as a fluctuating field, not limited to the mind but distributed all over the body and reaching out into its environment, with different constituents of the process constantly vying for control. The need for such a process philosophy has often been voiced, but rarely has there been an effort to develop it in a systematic and rigourous manner that leads to original accounts of identity, continuity, time, change, causality, agency and other topics. Throughout his new book, Raud engages with an unusually broad range of philosophical schools and debates, from New Materialism and Object-Oriented Ontology to both phenomenological and analytical philosophy of mind, from feminist philosophy of science to neurophilosophy and social ontology. Being in Flux will be of interest to students and scholars in philosophy and the humanities generally and to anyone interested in current debates about realism, materialism and ontology. (shrink)

This article explores the connections between film and ruderal plants: plants that grow spontaneously in anthropized environments and that we often call “weeds”. Thriving across damaged lands, ruderals are not only exceptional companions for thinking with at a time of ecological rupture, but also a way of engaging with less anthropocentric histories. As argued in this paper, such histories also pertain to film. Despite its timid representational interest in ruderals and “weeds”, cinema is concerned with the stories of (...) collaborative survival, companionship and contaminated diversity raised by such turbulent creatures. Framed by a reflection on our ruderal condition, a discussion around some recent artists’ films allows us to explore some of these problems, while putting an accent on the idea of affective ecologies and involutionary modes of perception. (shrink)

The article that discusses the issue of culturalism as an element of the idea of representation tries to examine a concept, which claims to represent reality through conceptualization, from scratch, or by going to the bottom in a manner of excavation. Foucault's archaeology was chosen as the most suitable method for this excavation activity. Because the archaeological method does not make a historical or meta-historical claim beyond the truth; it does not impose the necessary violence of the method on its (...) object. It grasps its object in its singularity, and most importantly, it thinks and suggests that the truth is no more than an invention. This archaeological study on the concept of culture tries to reveal the difference between the current meaning of the concept and its etymological origin and to grasp it in its singularity. In this way, the problematic relationship between the concepts that man invented and applied while engaging in understanding things that are happening around him will be revealed. Conceptualization is inherent in the idea of truth, which is based on absolutism and is no more than an invention, while ultimately subordinating the particular to the universal. While the article reveals the intolerance of the act of dichotomous thinking, which operates as a product of the effort to represent the truth, as in the nature-culture distinction, it acts according to the approach known as deconstruction in social sciences. In a representative thought, truth is what can actually be represented, presenting itself to the observer as an object of display. The fact that the understanding of truth is based on essentialist principles such as absolute, unchangeable, fixed, universal thanks to Plato makes an idealized representation inevitable. In fact, intellectual endeavors such as conceptualization, abstraction, and generalization mean the idealization of the concrete, singular, and unique by detaching it from its context. It can be said that underlying the idea of representation is the belief that the human mind can grasp the essence of things and therefore can represent them in thought, depending on the idea that truth is rational. As is, it is a thought that tries to keep realism in its hands, blesses it, and strives with all its might to declare its divine absolutism. Ultimately, while the mechanism of representation operates for the stable, it acts with the aim of establishing dominance. The distinction between the representative and the represented is ultimately the product of an anthropocentric perspective. Thanks to this distinction, it is inevitable that everything except the observer subject becomes the object of study. This point of view, believed to be one and universal, requires the fixation of the object of study. It can be said that the idea of representation, which signifies the ideal of absolute truth, underlies today's issues that are based on differences, such as language, religion, race, and gender, that have always been on the world agenda. As the products of representative thought, both binary categorization based on distinction such as nature and culture, and the concept that implies a direct relationship between thought and the outside world, realism is a state of alienation in which whatever is related to the human being ceases to belong to it and is used against it. The reification made possible by the distinction between the representative and the represented is actually nothing but alienation. It can be said that the rooted problem of the world of thought and the peoples of the world since Platonism is that reification and commodification have become so universal that they seem almost like natural, organic entities, and forms. The attempt of representative thought, which confines external reality to the conceptual world, to impose a framework on reality, breaks the connection with reality, and moreover, by being guided by concepts and abstractions, it builds iron cages around the human being. The insistence of Western thought on representation, no matter if it is true or false, no matter it is accepted or not, has led to the radical consequence of the abolition of certainty over reality. Today, the world of thought has evolved from the representation of the truth, which implies the idea that there is a necessary connection between the order of things and the order of words, to the reality of representation, where the boundary between reality and image is abolished, the reality is aestheticized and transformed into images, and society ultimately becomes cultural. With an entry into the cultural turn, everything has become cultural and conventional in the postmodern period. (shrink)

This article reflects on an ongoing artistic research practice that deals with sound, gender, power, spatiality, and human–nonhuman entanglement. Sparked by a sound design for a less crunchy “lady-friendly” crisp, the research inquires the relationship between gender and sound at human–nonhuman encounter through making and thinking. Drawing on queer theory, sound studies, and posthumanism, it aims to transcend essentialist, vision-focused, and anthropocentric conceptualisations of gender and, as an insight gained from working with low-frequency sound waves, it reflects on (...) sound as material-philosophically demonstrating human–nonhuman interconnectedness. The latter, as this article proposes, may encourage us to horizontalise hierarchies between the human and nonhuman. Finally, this text situates sonic thinking as a mode of trans*formative thinking: a process-oriented philosophy that aims to embrace the messy, queer ways of human–nonhuman relationality, which characterises a vibrant space from which this artistic research will further develop. (shrink)

In Primate Visions, the American philosopher of culture Donna Haraway, states that ‘primatology is a genre of feminist theory’. The reason she gives is that the politics of being female are intimately linked with the way we view animals and nature. Haraway’s main strategy aimed at opening up discourses and categories in order to produce a new kind of fiction and a new type of myth. In the coyote myth, Haraway develops an exemplary protean trickster figure that is consequential since (...) it might just offer the tools for survival in and improvement of the techno scientific world. Her coyote embodiments enable us to think bodies as active, ingenious, and generative agents, for whom metamorphosis and transfiguration are modes of becoming, and which have the potential to outwit the human intellect. If humans want to interact and get along with the world as coyote, they need to learn to interpret its signs correctly and to optimize anticipation of its contriving, scheming moves which are often curious, ironical, or unexpected. Humans can only successfully do this by making sustained efforts to understand the plotting world sufficiently from its perspective. This makes it possible to establish partial connections and alliances with it and keep the human anthropomorphizing tendencies at bay. (shrink)

Poststructuralism and Whiteheadian process thought each uniquely dismantle the anthropocentric hierarchies and speciesed constructions we have used to calculate our ethics with non-human bodies. Yet each perspective uniquely continues, despite its own affirmations, to privilege the identity and construction of the human over other bodies. In an effort to move past these shortcomings and into a more creative ethical imagination, this article reads Whiteheadian metaphysics as an affirmation of poststructural singularity, and uses poststructural criticism to deconstruct Whitehead’s subtler form (...) of anthropocentrism. By joining these traditions together, this article makes clear their respective blind spots, moves past the limited and troubled framework of species upheld in each, and advances the truly novel, creaturely relations for which both traditions adamantly call. (shrink)

Ethics as a field should, we argue, pay more attention to the (eco)system. Van Rensselaer Potter, one of the pillars of contemporary bioethics, advocated for a global “bios” ethics that literally and metaphorically bridges the gap between biological knowledge and ethical reflection. However, a Potterian Bio-Ethics faces a major obstacle: its acentric focus. Consequently, Global Bio-Ethics remains opaque for those trained under the anthropocentric biomedical ethics that instrumentalizes the environment. This paper aims to demystify two key concepts—Globality and Complexity—and (...) show how a Potterian Bio-Ethics can effectively bridge the gap between knowledge-building in ecology and policy-making in the context of medical and environmental practices. Drawing on an experience in Québec, Canada, to mitigate the threat of antimicrobial resistance using a biosurveillance system, we show the utility of having ethics as an integral part of ecosystem(ic) approaches to bridge health and environment. We conclude by arguing that bioethics (and bioethicists) should become a locus for cascading communication, collaboration, and translation by co-constructing biosurveillance data governance. (shrink)

Many philosophers advocate a change in our thinking in order to move beyond an anthropocentric view of the environment. In order to achieve the kind of thinking that makes for sound environmental thinking, we have to look more deeply into the nature of thought and to revise the relation between thought directed outward to the world and thought directed inwardly to thought itself. Only with such insight can we begin to think soundly about the environment. Thought (...) exhibits a characteristic that makes it hard to think environmentally soundly. This characteristic is the inability to think of something without at thesame time making it one’s property. In other words, if sound environmental thinking means moving beyond anthropocentric attitudes and, for example, extending moral categories to creatures other than humans, then we need to address how our thinking turns everything into “mine” before we go about establishing a theory about how that extension should take shape. Hegel is the philosopher who most deeply analyses the inevitable, yet dangerous role of “mining”—in the sense of “making mine,” in the act of thinking. This potentially problematic character of thought risks making a number of otherwise soundenvironmental ways of thinking, unsound. However, we can provide a balance for this problematic characteristic in our thinking. (shrink)

- Brings a new dimension to thinking about philosophical materialism and realism in the wake of phenomenology and deconstruction - Challenges speculative realism’s critique of contemporary Continental philosophy as correlationism - Uses Merleau-Ponty and Nancy to develop an ontology that respects the materiality and exteriority of what exists without reinstating the mind–world divide - Shows how Merleau-Ponty and Nancy overcome the Cartesian presupposition at work in current realist appeal to step out of our own thoughts to reach the ‘great (...) outdoors’ - Provides an alternative to the phenomenological reduction of being to sense - Defends anthropomorphism as a way of overcoming the Cartesian–Sartrian ontology of the object -/- Marie-Eve Morin proposes a reinterpretation of the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty and Nancy from the perspective of realist and object-oriented tendencies in contemporary philosophy. The realist critique of subject-centred anthropocentric thinking indicates the danger, inherent in the phenomenological approach, of reducing being to sense. Morin demonstrates how Merleau-Ponty and Nancy avoid this pitfall through the development of ontologies that respect the materiality and exteriority of what exists without reaffirming the Cartesian divide between mind and world. (shrink)

Binnen de ecologische discussie wordt een verscheidenheid aan argumenten gehanteerd. In deze bijdrage worden, langs filosofische en theologische weg, twee ecologische waardenoriëntaties gereconstrueerd, waarop de verschillende argumenten teruggaan. Het betreft een antropocentrische en een ecocentrische waardenoriëntatie.In actual discussion about the problem of pollution of the ecological environment various arguments have been used. In environmental philosophy these arguments are arranged in two fundamental thinking orientations: anthropocentrism and ecocentrism. Anthropocentric thinking about nature and men's position is held responsible for (...) the environmental crisis. In this article the author distinguishes within the antropocentric thinking form, between excluding and including anthropocentric thinking. It is the excluding form of anthropocentrism that is connected with environmental crisis. The difference between including anthropocentrism and ecocentrism lays in the valuation of nature: extrinsic vs. intrinsic value. The orientations are described by three basic concepts: the concept of man, the concept of nature and the concept of the standard of managing nature. In the second part of the article both orientations are described from the biblical-creation-theological point of view. There is the description focused on the concepts of God, 'imago Dei' and 'dominium terrae'. The question is to what degree these orientations are grounded in the Old Testament creation stories. (shrink)

The impermanence of human affairs is a major theme in Spinoza’s discussions of political histories, and from our present-day perspective it is both intriguing and ironic to see how this very theme has played out in the evolving fate of Spinoza’s association with atheism. While Spinoza’s contemporaries charged him with atheism in order to impugn his philosophy (and sometimes his character), in our times many lay readers and some scholars portray Spinoza as an atheist in order to commemorate his role (...) as a founder of modern secularism. In this paper, I will argue that Spinoza deserves neither vilification nor praise for being an atheist, for the simple reason that he was not one (unless one employs the term ‘atheism’ in a very peculiar sense). I have chosen the current topic as my contribution to a volume focused on the TTP, the Ethics, and their interrelations because it is precisely these two books which brought about the common reactionary accusation of atheism by Spinoza’s contemporaries. Addressing Spinoza’s 1663 book, Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy, Bayle writes: “Spinoza appears as orthodox in that book about the nature of God.” As we shall shortly see, Descartes too was accused of atheism by some of his contemporaries (though not so by Bayle). The latter designates his target quite explicitly: “[Spinoza’s] Tractatus Theologico Politicus, printed in Amsterdam, in the year 1670, is a pernicious and execrable book which contains all the seeds of the Atheism he plainly discovered in his Opera Posthuma.” François Lamy, in his 1696 Le nouvel athéisme renversé, also focused on the Ethics and the TTP in his attack on Spinoza’s atheism. Bayle’s reference to the Opera Posthuma is ostensibly targeting the Ethics at least primarily, if not uniquely. Even the most suspicious and distrustful mind would have to labor hard in order to find atheism in the Hebrew Grammar, or even in the Tractatus Politicus where Spinoza argues that it is not within the power, and hence right, of the commonwealth to induce people to adopt utterly absurd beliefs, such as “that the whole is greater than its part or that God does not exist.” The TTP and the Ethics are the works where Spinoza launches his merciless attack on anthropocentric thinking and anthropomorphic religion. Spinoza’s panentheism (“quicquid est, in Deo est”) constitutes the metaphysical foundation of the Ethics, and it is repeatedly and clearly alluded to in the TTP. Since it is these two elements – (1) Spinoza’s open assertions of panentheism and (2) his critique of andromorphic conceptions of God – which are the historical grounds for the atheism charge, it seems natural that the merit of this charge should be decided primarily by examination of these two foundational works. I will proceed in the following manner. In the first part of the paper, we will make our first acquaintance with the imputation of atheism by Spinoza’s contemporaries and Spinoza’s response to the charge (or lack thereof). In the second part, I discuss three broad strategies, or hermeneutic avenues, that have been pursued to impute atheism to Spinoza. The first of the three was dominant in Spinoza’s time, while the latter two were employed more recently. These strategies are not mutually exclusive and we can find occasionally various combinations of different shades of these three strategies. In this part, I will also raise some preliminary questions about the cogency of the hermeneutics employed by each strategy. In the third and fourth parts of the paper, I will discuss a small selection of key texts from the Ethics and the TTP, respectively, and argue that the atheist readings fail to make sense of these key passages (unless one adopts an extreme hermeneutics of suspicion which could allegedly find any view harbored in any text). Let me stress that this selection of passages is far from comprehensive, and that dozens of other passages can be adduced to establish the very same point. I hope by the end of the fourth part to convince the reader of the deep problems besetting the atheist readings. In the fifth and last part, I show that both panentheism and the critique of anthropomorphic religion and anthropomorphic conceptions of providence were quite common within rabbinic discourse. Thus, I will argue that if we are not in the business of announcing that both Maimonides and the Kabbalists were atheists, we should avoid the same imputation to Spinoza. Underlying my argument in this final part is the claim that at least some perceptions of Spinoza as an atheist are instances of what could be termed conceptual colonialism, i.e. the enforcement of the categories of a hegemonic culture (in this case, Western Christianity ) on minority cultures (in the current case, rabbinic Judaism). To be clear, this attitude need not be motivated by ill intentions or racism. It is always tempting and easy to explain the unfamiliar through the familiar, but conceptual stagnation and insistence on imposing the categories of the familiar on other cultures may quickly lead to deep distortion and blindness, despite one’s best intentions. Unless one is exceedingly careful to avoid the – completely natural – temptation to impose one’s own categories on a foreign culture (and to look for the coin only under the street light), one is likely to end up with distorted conceptions of the relevant alien culture, despite one’s best intentions. (shrink)

This article puts into conversation Friedrich Nietzsche’s perspectivism and a particular expression of “African animism,” drawn from my ethnographic fieldwork in Ghana. Nietzsche’s perspectivism extends interpretation beyond the human species into natural processes. Like perspectivism, African animism troubles the binaries—body/soul, nature/culture—that permeate anthropocentric thinking. Human-nonhuman relations are refigured as socio-ecological relations: the earth may be regarded as life-generating ancestors; baobab trees may approach humans as kin. These two images of the world intersect, but they do not mesh together. (...) Nietzsche adopts perspectivism as active intersections between dynamic processes, within an open universe that has not been predesigned for humans. Animism tends toward a world of personalized relationships that would reach harmony if we would only lighten our ecological footprint. I draw upon such resonances to advance a new ethic of experiential environmentalism that treats ecological threats as lived risks and shared experiences with a lively and communicating “environment.”. (shrink)

The 'More-than-Human' reader brings together texts by writers across a wide array of disciplines that reflect on the state of post-anthropocentric thinking today. Focusing on the ecologies and technologies of climate injustice and inequalities, as well as the destructive structures lurking within anthropocentrism, More-than-Human proposes complex entanglements, frictions, and reparative attention across species and beings. Thinking past the centrality of the human subject, the texts that compose this reader begin to imagine networks of ethics and responsibility emerging (...) not from the ideologies of old, but from the messy and complex liveliness around us, and underfoot. (shrink)

There's a moment about halfway through Avatar where Jake Sully wakes up disoriented from the link to his avatar. “Everything is backwards now,” he says, “like out there is the true world and in here is the dream.” Jake's life in the Resources Development Administration (RDA) mining colony seems unreal, while his avatar life seems real. There are shortsighted and enlightened versions of anthropocentrism. In Avatar, the RDA corporation offers an example of anthropocentric thinking. Rather than frame the (...) issue in terms of shortsighted versus enlightened anthropocentricism, however, it is more helpful to think about superficial versus deep humanity. Avatar suggests that a superficial sense of our humanity involves shortsighted anthropocentrism. Not only does the movie work with the novel category of deep humanity, but it also depicts “relational reason”, the logic that deepens our humanity. (shrink)

The present collection takes stock of posthumanism and its theoretical development and impact in the field of Anglophone literary and cultural studies, with a particular focus on its role in education and the practice of teaching English. Posthumanism informs work in environmental or ecological criticism, climate change research, or human-animal studies - and poses an educational challenge since it also affects curricular and pedagogic theory and practice. Moreover, humanist idea(l)s of subject formation and individually acquired competences have a direct bearing (...) on conceptions of education. This is why the volume interrogates the potentials and pitfalls of posthumanist pedagogies and its connections with digitization, multiliteracies, non-European and non-anthropocentric thinking, and the role of literature pedagogy more generally, presenting case studies of teaching the posthuman from primary to tertiary levels. (shrink)

This article argues that Graham Harman’s philosophy navigates between realism, an immaterialist realism in his case, in the framework of ontology and correlationism in that of epistemology, the latter aspect that he cannot avoid despite raising a post-anthropocentric thinking. To explain Harman’s theoretical proposal, we analize the central axis of his ontology, objects, also explaining how his definition deviates from the classical perspectives on these objects, and we study the way in which they are linked to each other, (...) an issue that will lead to defend the correlationist character of Harman’s epistemology. (shrink)

The classical Confucian thinker Xunzi is often characterized as a hard-nosed realist, and stands out in the early Chinese canon for his uncompromising materialist cosmology. Xunzi sees the actions of Heaven in terms of natural material forces rather than supernatural theistic ones, and this view leads him to reject various forms of supernaturalism. Xunzi's cosmological concept of the Triad formed by Heaven, Earth, and Humans also places humans at the center of the cosmos, and as such makes his stance very (...) literally anthropocentric.Anthropocentric thinking has been blamed, most famously by Lynn White, Jr., for the attitudes and prerogatives that authorize the human exploitation of nature.1 Indeed, some... (shrink)

The anthropocentric orientation of traditional understandings of Christian faith and life, further accentuated by the existentialist terms in which theology was articulated in mid‐century by Tillich and others, produced theologies no longer appropriate in today's world of evolutionary and ecological thinking about human existence and its embeddedness in the web of life on planet Earth. This problem can be addressed with the help of several new concepts that enable us to understand both humanity‐in‐the‐world and God in ways in (...) keeping with these present conceptions, thus providing a more intelligible and illuminating way of understanding Christian faith and life today. (shrink)

Radical democratic thinking is becoming intrigued by the material situatedness of its political agents and by the role of nonhuman participants in political interaction. At stake here is the displacement of narrow anthropocentrism that currently guides democratic theory and practice, and its repositioning into what we call ‘the nonhuman condition’. This Critical Exchange explores the nonhuman condition. It asks: What are the implications of decentering the human subject via a new materialist reading of radical democracy? Does this reading dilute (...) political agency? Or should this be seen, on the contrary, as an invitation for new voices and demands to enter into democratic assemblages? How might engagement with the more-than-human disrupt or extend theories of radical democracy? Hans Asenbaum and Amanda Machin discuss the human democratic subject both through radical democratic and new materialist lenses. They suggest that a new materialist decentred subject does not lose agency but further gains political responsibility in radical democracy. Jean-Paul Gagnon highlights the possibility of becoming through loss. In losing our anthropocentric arrogance—our understanding of being other and better than animal—we become more connected and discover our place in human-nonhuman assemblages. Melissa Orlie agrees that something can be gained through renouncing dominant human fantasies and presents a ‘radical democratic naturalism’. By renouncing land violence and acknowledging nature’s subjectivity, we can further nonexploitative radical democratic politics. This is where the notion of ‘tidalectic’ processes introduced by James L. Smith is helpful. Focusing on water and the Indigenous knowledges around rivers, he considers how democracy and community can be reimagined as plural, cyclical and attentive to the nonhuman with which the human is inevitably entangled. Diana Leong offers a different approach. Considering the nonhuman from the perspective of Black Studies demands an awareness to how blackness has long been constituted as non- or partially human. (shrink)

Scientific evolutionary/ecological thinking is the basis for today's understanding that we are now in an ecological crisis. Religions, however, often resist reordering their thinking in light of scientific ideas, and this presents difficulties in trying to develop a viable global ecological ethic. In both the West and Asia religiomoral ecological concerns continue to be formulated largely in terms of traditional concepts rather than in more global terms, as scientific thinking about ecological matters might encourage them to do. (...) The majority of this article is devoted to the kind of reformulation of Western Christian conceptions of God, humanity, and the relation between them that is necessary to address this problem. The question is then raised whether similar critical thinking about religiomoral issues raised by today's evolutionary/ecological scientific thinking is going on in Asian religions and whether it would be too presumptuous (in view of our colonial history) for us Westerners to ask for such rethinking. This leads to a final question: Without such transformations in religious traditions East and West, is the development of a truly global ecological ethic really feasible? (shrink)

Due to the rapid development in the modern linguistics of anthropocentric and interdisciplinary studies, the idea is gaining ground that languages of the world are examples of various division of the world. The article is devoted to the semantic reconstruction of the cult of the androgynous deity of the Bashkirs on the basis of toponymy and mythology. The study is based on the hypothesis that the collective linguistic consciousness or ‘collective unconsciousness‘ of different cultures and peoples is based on (...) common values, which gives an indication of the universality of mythopoetical thinking of the peoples. The versatility of mythological thinking leads to the creation of typologically similar images related to the general idea. This suggests that the mechanism of cognitive knowledge and explanation of the world in different languages has some common ground. The object of this study are Bashkir hydronyms, the subject of analysis are linguocultural mechanisms of conceptualizing the world. This article is aimed at reconstruction of the archetypal meaning of the mythonym ‘Irgiz‘, which became a hydronym, and to understanding of its origin based on theoretical principles of the relationship between language and thinking, language and myth, the universality of mythopoetic thinking of peoples, on mythological legends of the Bashkirs, and on the data of Bashkortostan’s toponymy. In accordance with the intended purpose, the author attempts to understand the peculiarities of the mythopoetic thinking of the Bashkirs related to the archetype of the ‘river‘, ‘water‘. For this purpose, linguistic facts, ethnographic and folklore materials of the Bashkir and other Turkic peoples, as well as facts of comparative mythology of the peoples of the world were considered, and on this basis an attempt to show the universality of mythopoetic thinking of peoples and to explain the origin of the Bashkir hydronym ‘Irgiz‘ was made. The research was conducted using the methods of linguocultural interpretation, semantic reconstruction, and etymological analysis. Folklore and mythological motives outlined in the paper helped the author to trace the thoughts of primitive human and to conclude that in the mythology of many peoples the belief in the divine essence of water is reflected: water is the source of life, of creation. This idea is incorporated in the name of the mythonym ‘Irgiz‘ rising to the reconstructed abstract deity, symbolizing the idea of combining two elements in one individual, the idea of creation and fertility. (shrink)

The attempt to appropriate Heidegger’s thinking in order to found environmental ethics continues to pose challenges both for understanding the premise of an ethic, and, conversely, for unfolding the importance of his thought in the effort to displace the anthropocentric focus of modern philosophy. These challenges must be taken up on a methodological as well as a thematic level, in order to show how a claim of being can implicate a reciprocal guidance pertaining to our treatment of the (...) earth, nature, and animals. An appeal to the ethos of situated dwelling is not sufficient to ground a transhuman ethic; rather, a precursory step must be taken to uncover a common space of embodiment, thereby marking a jointure whereby habitats fostering the potential for animals to “flourish” can be cultivated in concert with our own capacity to dwell. When viewed through this prism of our “incarnality,” the stewardship that we practice in dwelling on the earth can also “formally indicate” a sense of proportionality, e.g., a “measure,” counter balancing the interests of animals with humans. Conversely, the search for a trans-human ethic calls for a further transformation of phenomenology through its interface with hermeneutics. (shrink)

This article describes methods and ideas that emerged from a continuing enquiry into ‘metadesign’ that led us to think about the role of ‘consciousness’ in teams, communities and the biosphere. In the West the notion of ‘consciousness’ has been shaped by humanism, industrialization and some strident forms of individualism. These have encouraged us to see it in strongly anthropocentric and solipsistic terms. The global economic system also reflects this individualistic ideology, given that ‘growth’, is driven by personal avarice on (...) a collective scale. On the other hand, capitalism encourages enterprises to scale-up when they become successful. Both tendencies reduce the consciousness of organizations and communities. The article illustrates this idea by describing a ‘quadratic’ model of team consciousness that was developed to enhance practical developments that support personal, interpersonal, transpersonal and environmentally situated modes of awareness. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Surfing the Sublime:Tim Winton's Breath and Eco-HeroismSteve Mentz (bio)The sublime represents an ecological problem. Breathing poses an entangled solution. Surfing, in which a human body stands upright inside a rotating barrel of unbreathable whitewater, provides a way to imagine the connection between these two things.The sublime has represented an elevated category of literary language since the classical writer Longinus's On the Sublime (~1st century CE). From the start, the (...) sublime captures grandeur and also an excess that challenges human thinking. Many of the essential Romantic and Post-Romantic tropes of the sublime that would later appear in dense philosophical accounts, from Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant to Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jacques Derrida, show themselves embryonically in Longinus's brief classical description.1 The key force of sublime style, Longinus emphasizes, is irrationality: "A lofty passage does not convince the reason of the reader, but takes him out of himself. That which is admirable ever confounds our judgment" (1.4). The conceptual violence of the sublime strains our imaginations almost to breaking, and Longinus's intuition that sublimity always sits on the far side of human comprehension becomes a central feature of this idea in literary history. Although we know very little about Longinus the author–neither his name nor the century in which he lived are certain–he fingers the particular pleasurable pain and rupture of coherence that would become the signature of the sublime in modern poetics. The problem with the sublime perspective is that it craves rupture, centers the human imagination, and refuses to make space for nonhuman collaborators. The opposite of the sublime's imaginative conquest of the world may be simple breathing, the taking of alien air into one's lungs and body, and the environmental dependence each breath marks.The philosopher Graham Harman has recently traced the sublime lineage of Burke and Kant to Lyotard, Levinas, Derrida, and other twentieth-century thinkers, in order to reject the concept as fundamentally [End Page 79] anthropocentric. Harman instead advocates for a philosophy that does not require the shaping structures of human perspective. He argues for an ecological art that engages with the world beyond the merely human perspective, "art that explores unforeseen interactions between the different parts of the external world." What Harman terms "unsublime ecology" might reasonably be described as an inhuman ecological perspective. The philosopher reminds us that the sublime has always been, both from Longinus and in Harman's reading explicitly from Kant and Burke to Lyotard and Derrida, a ju-jitsu trick in which the imagination of a (white male) subject reintegrates what it cannot fully comprehend. The list of poetic works whose language most commonly appears as exemplary of the sublime–Milton's Paradise Lost, Shelley's "Mont Blanc," Shakespeare's King Lear, Wordsworth's The Prelude–suggest that the mode appeals to poetic egoists of a particularly masculinine type.2The heroic sublime of these poets and theorists falters on the physical fact of breathing. Each day of their lives, more than 20,000 times per day, every one of these men, even stern, blind Milton dictating his prophetic poem to dutiful daughters after his revolution had failed, drew nonhuman air into and out of his lungs, exchanging oxygen and carbon dioxide. Each man's thinking continued, while their minds dwelled little on how their body's dependence on alien matter to suspire might impinge upon the heroic sense of self. Even prophets and geniuses, even Wordsworth and Derrida, depend on unconscious patterns. Even the greatest of poets breathes.That's where surfing comes in, in particular Tim Winton's 2008 surf novel Breath, which relates a minor-key epic of surfing against breathing. The novel's core figures devote themselves to intentional oxygen deprivation: our teenage narrator-hero Pikelet; his rebellious buddy Loonie; Sando, the Australian surf-seer they follow; and Sando's American one-time freestyle skier wife, Eva (note the unsubtle symbolism of her name), whose injured knee keeps her off the snow but does not prevent her from chasing sublimity through self-suffocating games that involve sex, a plastic bag, and eventually Pikelet. To court mortality by cutting... (shrink)

This book challenges conventional notions of the Anthropocene and champions the Hydrocene: the Age of Water. It presents the Hydrocene as disruptive, conceptual epoch and curatorial theory, emphasising water's pivotal role in the climate crisis and contemporary art. The Hydrocene is a wet ontological shift in eco-aesthetics which redefines our approach to water, transcending anthropocentric, neo-colonial and environmentally destructive ways of relating to water. As the most fundamental of elements, water has become increasingly politicised, threatened and challenged by the (...) climate crisis. In response, The Hydrocene articulates and embodies the distinctive ways contemporary artists relate and engage with water, offering valuable lessons towards climate action. Through five compelling case studies across swamp, river, ocean, fog and ice, the book binds feminist environmental humanities theories with the practices of eco-visionary artists. Focusing on Nordic and Oceanic water-based artworks, it demonstrates how art can disrupt established human-water dynamics. By engaging hydrofeminist, care-based and planetary thinking, the Hydrocene learns from the knowledge and agency of water itself within the tide of art going into the blue. The Hydrocene urgently highlights the transformative power of eco-visionary artists in reshaping human-water relations. At the confluence of contemporary art, curatorial theory, climate concerns and environmental humanities, this is essential reading for researchers, curators, artists, students and anyone seeking to reconsider their connection with water and advocate for climate justice amid the ongoing natural-cultural water crisis. (shrink)

The permutation of basic atoms—nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and phosphorus―into the biomolecules DNA and RNA, subsequently evolved in cells and brains, defining the origin of life and intelligence, remains unexplained. Equally the origin of the genetic information and the intertwined nature of ‘hardware’ and ‘software’ involved in the evolution of bio-molecules and the cells are shrouded in mystery. This treatise aims at exploring individual and swarm behaviour patterns which potentially hint at as yet unknown biological principles. It reviews theories of (...) evolution with perspectives from the earth sciences, commencing with the earliest observed records of life. This is followed by reviews and discussion of the building blocks of life, marine and terrestrial communities, the arthropods, birds and finally humans. It is suggested that, further to the mutation/natural selection processes established by Darwin and Wallace, an understanding of the evolution of intelligence remains little understood. A directionality of evolutionary trajectories is evident, not least the purposeful thinking process of humans as well as animals. It is not clear how directional intelligence, manifested for example by the collective intelligence of arthropod colonies, has evolved from mutation/natural selection processes. Potential clues for the understanding of life and evolution are provided by Aristotle’s dictum of “the whole being greater than the sum of the parts”, Niels Bohr’s principle of quantum complementarity and George Ellis’ theory of top-down causality. Inherent in the question of the origin of life is an anthropocentric bias, related to the self-referential Anthropic Principle and theological paradigms of man’s supposed dominion over all other species. The Anthropic Principle, however, should be capable of being circumvented using the scientific falsification method, assuming universal verified constants of physics. The phenomenon of the human mastery of fire and the splitting of the atom, leading to the seventh major mass extinction of species, remains incomprehensible. (shrink)

The purpose of this study is to probe the implications of Derrida’s linguistic theories in his late philosophy. Adopting an interdisciplinary and deconstructive approach to critical discourse analysis that erodes the foundation of anthropocentric binary thought paradigms, this exploration of Derrida’s ecolinguistic dream of a more biocentric language problematizes three specific cognitive structures that represent an unsustainable form of dichotomous thinking. The philosopher illustrates that the concept of “human” and “animal,” the “genesis myth,” and the Cartesian notion of (...) the Bête machine are deadly delusions that must be replaced with a more biocentric outlook on life. (shrink)

A new context for ethics and ethics education is evident in a rapidly changing world and our threatened planet. The current focus on considerations of inter-personal ethics within an anthropocentric perspective on life should be extended to embrace considerations of global and ecological ethics within an eco-centric perspective on global and planetary health. The pathway to understanding and adapting to this new context includes promoting shifts in life styles from selfish hyper-individualism and wasteful consumerism towards cautious use of limited (...) resources within an increasingly interdependent world in which the equal moral worth of all and sustainability are valued. Critical scholarly approaches to global politics and to the global political economy could facilitate such change and encourage iterative interactive processes instead of seeking conclusive definitive ‘scientific’ solutions to all problems. Hopefully this shift in perspective could be achieved firstly through sensitization to new and increasingly challenging ethical dilemmas, and then by encouraging rational thinking and action based on global and ecological considerations rather than on false economic dogma and the distorted workings of a market civilization. Moving ahead with these activities must begin with promotion of education, learning and self-reflection to foster the widespread development of a global state of mind. Such a shift would require an expanded ethical discourse, with consideration of ethical dilemmas beyond human inter-personal relationships. These should include intra-institutional and inter-institutional relationships, as well as relational ethics between nations in a post-Westphalian world, and between humans and nature in an era now called the Anthropocene, to ensure survival on a planet undergoing entropy.The adverse effects of intense competition could be reduced by encouraging greater cooperation, linking security issues to global health and social justice issues, and using inspirational narratives and examples of moral imagination/moral leadership. These educational programs should be initiated in schools and become mandatory for all first-year College and University students. Such an agenda is feasible given human ingenuity, determination, resilience and adequate resources, but will also require political and social will as its drivers. (shrink)

Uncontainable Life: A Biophilosophy of Bioart investigates the ways in which thinking through the contemporary hybrid artistico-scientific practices of bioart is a biophilosophical practice, one that contributes to a more nuanced understanding of life than we encounter in mainstream academic discourse. When examined from a Deleuzian feminist perspective and in dialogue with contemporary bioscience, bioartistic projects reveal the inadequacy of asking about life’s essence. They expose the enmeshment between the living and non-living, organic and inorganic, and, ultimately, life and (...) death. Instead of examining the defining criteria of life, bioartistic practices explore and enact life as processual, differential, and always already uncontainable, thus transcending preconceived material and conceptual boundaries. In this way, this doctoral thesis concentrates on the ontology of life as it emerges through the selected bioartworks: “semi-living” sculptures created by The Tissue Culture and Art Project and the performance May the Horse Live in Me by L’Art Orienté Objet. The hope is that such an ontology can enable future conceptualisations of an ethico-politics that avoids the anthropocentric logic dominant in the humanities and social sciences. (shrink)

This book makes explicit the ecological implications of Martin Heidegger. It examines how the trajectory of Heidegger's thinking harbors an "ecological turn," which comes to the forefront in his attempt to anticipate the impending crisis precipitated by modern technology. Schalow's emphasis on such key motifs as stewardship, dwelling, and 'letting be' serves to coalesce the problem of freedom in a new and innovative way, in order to expand the interpretive or hermeneutic horizon for re-examining Heidegger's philosophy. By prioritizing a (...) response to today's environmental crisis and the possible impact upon future generations, the author traverses a divide within Heidegger scholarship by developing a deeper, critical outlook on his philosophy--without either reiterating standard interpretations or rejecting it wholesale. He develops a trans-human approach to ethics, which, by prioritizing the welfare of the earth, nature, and animals, counters the anthropocentric bias and destructive premise of modern technology. Heidegger's Ecological Turn will be of interest to Heidegger scholars and researchers working in phenomenology, hermeneutics, continental philosophy, and environmental philosophy. (shrink)

This paper outlines three broad conceptual schemes currently in play in the sciences concerned with explaining cognitive abilities. One is the anthropocentric scheme – human cognition – that dominated our thinking about cognition until very recently. Another is the cybernetic-computational scheme – cybernetic cognition – rooted in cognitive science and flourishing in such fields as artificial intelligence, computational neuroscience, and biocybernetics. The third is an evolutionary biological scheme – phylogenetic cognition – that conceptualizes cognition in terms of the (...) phylogeny-based approach we take to all other traits of evolved organisms. It shows how these conceptions ground different research questions and methods, and how their relationship is still in flux. (shrink)

The environmental crisis is the most prominent challenge humanity has ever had to battle with, and humanity is currently failing. The Anthropocene—or so called ‘age of humans’—is indeed a period when the survival of humanity has never been so much at risk. This book locates itself in the field of critical green political theory. Fremaux's analysis of the current environmental crisis calls for us to embrace radical shifts in our modes of being; or, in other words, socially progressive innovations that (...) will be described within the unique framework of "Green Republicanism." In offering a constructive and emancipatory delineation of what could be considered an ecological civilization that is respectful of its natural environment and social differences, this book describes how to shift from an ‘arrogant speciesism’ and materialistic lifestyle to a post-anthropocentric ecological humanism focusing on the ‘good life’ within ecological limits. This new political regime calls for a radical reinvention of our societies, a decentering of the humans within our metaphysical worldview, and a withdrawal of the capitalist technosphere at the benefit of the biosphere. It will require a new economic paradigm that replaces the unsustainable capitalist logic of growth by sustainable degrowth and steady economics. Rooted in ethical thinking and political philosophy, this book seeks to offer a concrete roadmap of how sustainable societies can be fostered. (shrink)

At least since Foster (2002), scholars interested in Aristotle’s views about environmental ethics have focused primarily upon his teleological account of non-human animals as the basis for an Aristotelian environmental virtue ethics. But although Aristotle’s scientific account of non-human animals can serve as the basis for a form of environmental ethics akin to “nature preservation,” one finds in his account of “household management” (or oikonomikē) a very different sort of environmental ethic, one that looks much more like a form of (...) “nature conservation.” My paper argues that for Aristotle, oikonomikē is indeed both “environmental” and an “ethic.” The first part of my chapter shows that oikonomikē is fundamentally environmental insofar as it concerns what Aristotle in Politics 1.8 calls “property acquisition in accord with nature” or “true wealth” (Pol. 1.8.1256b26–27, 30–31), namely the prudential use of natural resources in a way that recognizes the dependence of ways of life upon different habitats or environments. The second part of my chapter shows that oikonomikē is also an “ethic” insofar as it embeds three different kinds of limit on the use of animate and inanimate natural resources, namely that natural resource use is subordinate to expertise about the happiness of the political community (or what Aristotle calls “politics” [πολιτική]); that natural resource use, as an instrumental good, is limited and governed by the craft or expertise of oikonomikē; and that notions of unlimited commercial “wealth acquisition” (χρηματιστική) are based on ethically problematic ways of life. After showing that Aristotle’s account of oikonomikē is indeed an environmental ethic, the third part of my chapter considers the objection that oikonomikē is a weak environmental ethic insofar as it is exploitatively or axiological anthropocentric. I respond that Aristotle’s account of non-human animal domestication provides conceptual resources for thinking about non-human animals as subordinate members in one’s ecological-political community, especially with respect to his invocation of the craft analogy (in the example of shepherds) and inter-species utility friendships. Although Aristotle has multiple sources relevant for understanding environmental ethics, his account of oikonomikē is both a neglected source and a potentially fruitful one. (shrink)

Although idealism was widely defended in the history of philosophy, it is nowadays almost universally considered a non-starter. This holds in particular for a strong form of idealism, which asserts that not just minds or the mental in general, but our human minds in particular are metaphysically central to reality. Such a view seems to be excessively anthropocentric and contrary to what we by now know about our place in the universe. Nonetheless, there is reason to think that such (...) a strong form of idealism is indeed correct. In this paper, I will present an argument for idealism of this kind through considerations about a harmony between our thought and reality. The central argument in favour of idealism will come from a possibly unexpected source: we can see that a strong form of idealism is true simply from considerations about our language alone. I shall argue that thinking about how we represent reality allows us to conclude that idealism is true, and thus that reality must be a certain way. But no argument of this kind seems to allow for a metaphysical conclusion like idealism, since considerations about our language alone only show how we represent reality, not how reality is. And thus idealism can’t possibly follow, since it concerns how reality is, not just how we represent it to be. A good part of the second half of the paper is devoted to showing how such an argument is possible after all, and that it really does establish idealism. (shrink)

Environmentalist philosophers often paint a holistic picture, stressing such things as the continuity of humanity with wider nature and our membership of the 'natural community' . The implication seems to be that a non-anthropocentric philosophy requires that we strongly identify ourselves with nature and therefore that we downplay any human/non-human distinction. An alternative view, I think more interesting and plausible, stresses the distinction between humanity and a nature valued precisely for its otherness. In this article I discuss some of (...) its main elements, and some of the difficulties involved with keeping nature's otherness in focus. Firstly (in sections 1-5), I try to clarify what I take to be the otherness-based position by distinguishing it from the apparently similar views of John Passmore, Robert Elliott and Keekok Lee, and some opposed holistic views, especially of J. Baird Callicott. Then, in the second half of the article (sections 6-7), I argue that if nature is valued in virtue of its otherness, this value is best thought of as an extrinsic, final and objective good, where 'objectivity' is a 'method of understanding', in Thomas Nagel's sense. Although I give some reasons for preferring an otherness account to certain alternative positions, I make no overall attempt to 'prove' that nature is valuable for its otherness. My aim is to show that, if it is, then this seems the best way to understand that value. (shrink)

Within educational philosophy and theory, there has been an international re-turn to envision study as an alternative formation to disrupt the defining learning logic. As an enrichment, this paper articulates “Daoist onto-un-learning” as an Eastern form of study, drawing upon Roger Ames’s interpretation of the ancient Chinese correlative cosmology and relational personhood thinking. This articulation is to dialogue with the conceptualizations of study shared by Giorgio Agamben, Derek Ford, and Tyson Lewis, and unfolds in three steps. First, I examine (...) how their conceptualizations of study constrain the studier-doing-study logic as a commonsensical expression of “foundational individualism” and anthropocentric disordering. Second, re-invoking the ancient Chinese wisdom, I envision “Daoist onto-un-learning” as a non-individualistic and non-anthropocentric form of study, re-configuring study and learning no longer as two disparate, if not necessarily oppositional, formations but into a Daoist bipolar yin-yang movement. Finally, I story-tell my doctoral research experience as a Daoist onto-un-learning journey, a spiralling learning-study movement, to unpack the ways it suspends and overturns the modern-Western trap/trope of anthropocentric-foundational individualism. In so doing, this paper further internationalizes and supplements the current study scholarship in relation to learning in a way so-far hardly explored yet cross-culturally provocative. (shrink)

This article searches for a way of theorizing the interconnectedness of processes of individuation, relationality and affect, with the aim of clearing the ground for an approach that establishes the basis of this interconnectedness by reference to mechanisms common to all living things. It establishes a number of shifts that enable us to think the categories and concepts like the individual, the subject, the group, the threshold, relationality, co-implication and so on according to a fundamental decentring, finally breaking with both (...) subject-centredness and its privilege of the individual as model or starting point; the same epistemological shift implies the rejection of the anthropocentric divide between humans and animals, while avoiding species of sociobiologism, pre-formationism, geneticism and other monocausal paradigms. What the new problematic of life enjoins us to rethink are the standpoint of singularity rather than that of the individual, coupled to the standpoint of relationality as a principle enabling us to think the self—other, human—animal, nature—culture and human—world in terms of compossibility and complex becoming. This view about the co-constitution of all life has major implications regarding responsibility for the other and responsibility for the world, grounded in the standpoint of the temporality and historicity of being as existential condition circumscribing the relation to the other. This shift at the level of ontology is explored via an engagement with the work of Simondon and his conceptual apparatus, particularly ideas of psychic and collective individuation, the pre-and transindividual, the associated milieu; this perspective is re-articulated by way of the work of Merleau-Ponty, Haraway’s notion of ‘companion species’, Ettinger’s concept of the ‘I—other plurality’, and cognate concepts that point to a new terrain for theorizing affect. (shrink)