The author argues that all forms of life are interconnected and that no being, construct, or object can exist independently from the ecological entanglement, nor does "nature" exist as an entity separate from the uglier or more synthetic elements of life. Realizing this interconnectedness is what the author calls the ecological thought. He investigates the philosophical, political, and aesthetic implications of this interconnectedness.

유교는 일찍이 지구 생태계가 맞이하고 있는 환경 위기와 생명의 대멸종을 극복할 수 있는 사상 자원으로 주목을 받고 있다. 이런 맥락에서 유교사상 중 ‘만물일체(萬物一體)’설은 인간 중심주의와 대척 지점에 서있는 사상으로 간주되고 있다. 모든 존재가 하나의 덩어리로 이어져있기 때문에 한 생명체의 고통은 공감되는 특성을 가지고 있다. 이러한 공감은 지구 생태계에 대해 인간 중심주의(anthropocentrism)가 관철하는 상황과 다른 대응과 책임을 요구한다. 주렴계의 ‘창전초부제’ 고사는 만물일체를 구현하고 있는 상징적 사건으로 주목할 만하다.BR 주렴계의 ‘창전초불제’ 내용은 아주 간단하다. 그럼에도 철학과 미학의 역사에 던진 영향은 적지 않다. 정명도도 (...) 유사한 체험을 하며 주석을 달았고 주희는 공자의 ‘무우귀영(舞雩歸詠)’과 주렴계의 ‘창전초부제’를 독서의 즐거움을 결합시켰다. 왕양명은 아예 “창전초부제 고사에 대한 최고의 주석을 달려고 노력했다. 창전초부제 고사는 사람이 세계를 이해하는 조그만 창을 넘어 형이상학적 체험이자 시적 정취이자 심미적 쾌감을 대변하는 큰 사건으로 보았기 때문이다. 이렇게 보면 창전초부제 고사는 ‘연비어약(鳶飛魚躍)’과 마찬가지로 세계를 인간중심이 아니라 인간과 자연을 동류이자 동기로 바라보는 새로운 관점을 제시한다고 할 수 있다. (shrink)

Artworks are attentional engines. They are artifacts intentionally designed to direct attention to what we might call their artistically salient features. The artistically salient features of a work are those aspects of their formal-compositional structure that carry information about what they express, their point, purpose, or meaning. These aspects of a work reflect the range of compositional strategies and choices an artist has employed to produce their work. Critically, artists deploy exogenous and endogenous perceptual strategies tailored to direct attention and (...) reveal what they mean to express. Painters, for instance, manipulate the perceptual salience of different areas of the canvas to directly engage perceptual systems, e.g. manipulating contrasts in the tonal properties, hue value, or scale of spatial frequency information. However, shared art critical knowledge can also be exploited to indirectly engage endogenous attentional processes, shape perception, and guide a consumer’s understanding of what is expressed in a work. The range of exogenous and endogenous perceptual strategies an artist employs shape what an artifact affords a consumer as an artwork. Access to these affordances depends upon the structure of the works, the structure of perceptual systems, and an understanding of the broad range of art critical and cultural practices that define the artworld for a community at a time. In this chapter I will employ a diagnostic recognition framework and a biased competition theory of selective attention to develop a model for understanding the way artists exploit exogenous and endogenous perceptual strategies in their works and map the complex environment of an artwork. (shrink)

Debates in ecological social theory are characterised by dualisms of nature and society. The author proposes the notion of ‘ecological aporias’ to account for these dualisms, focusing on three landmark examples of ecological thought over the past four decades from Niklas Luhmann, Bruno Latour and Jason W. Moore. He shows the persistence in this work of paradoxes and intractable contradictions revolving around the nature/society dualism. Rather than trying to dissolve these ecological aporias, he draws on (...) recent work in eco-deconstruction to suggest that the ecological is itself an aporetic category and that this enables a new perspective for political ecology in an age of climate crisis. Rejecting Latour’s identification of political ecology with the politics of dwelling, he argues that climate change demands we recognise forms of life irreducible to the ontological security on which the concept of the ecological has long been based. (shrink)

My objective in this article is to consider the implications of Bernard Stiegler’s theory of the neganthropocene for the politics of knowledge and education. Stiegler sets out his theory of...

This article reconstructs the forgotten friendship between Georges Bataille and the Russian émigré poet and philosopher Boris Poplavsky. Comparing their solar metaphysics, I focus on conceptions of friendship, sacrifice and depersonalisation. First, I retrace Bataille’s relationship to early Surrealis and Russian circles in interwar Paris, with a focus on his friendship with Irina Odoevtseva. I then offer a novel reading of Poplavsky’s poetry through the lens of Bataille’s philosophy, analysing a recurring motif that I call ‘dark solarity’. Uncovering a hidden (...) intertextual dialogue between Poplavsky and Bataille, I argue for Poplavsky’s lasting impact on Bataille’s anti-Icarian sun cult. Finally, my paper demonstrates how Poplavsky’s writings on solar sacrifice, excess and friendship left marks on Bataille’s vision of a solar community, embodied in the secret society Acéphale. The dialogue between Poplavsky and Bataille, I finally suggest, is a missing piece in the entangled history of Russian and French philosophy, as well as an original contribution to discourses on friendship in twentieth-century continental thought. (shrink)

Nikolai Alekseevich Umov , a professor at Moscow and New Russian universities, Russia's first theoretical physicist and a mathematical philosopher, according to N. E. Zhukovskii's definition, developed a genuinely ecological philosophy, which is usually included in the philosophy of Russian cosmism. He made the first global forecast1 that took into account the finiteness of resources on earth, population growth, and food reserves.

We have become estranged from the cosmic movements, according to Bataille. We are confined by the error linked to the representation of ‘the stationary earth’. We have negated the immersive immanence of the whole and made nature into a fixed world of tools and things. How then do we recognise ourselves as part of the ‘rapture of the heavens’? Bataille urges us to consider life as a solar phenomenon, the free play of solar energy on the earth. This paper argues (...) how Bataille’s cosmic vision anticipates both planetary and ecological thinking. This entails a base materialism of difference based on a radical Nietzschean and Heraclitean theory of becoming and flux. This thought is developed along Bataillean concepts such as the movement of the whole, the labyrinthine, and compound beings, ipseity, as well as the concept of a communifying movement. This materialism paired with Vladimir Vernadsky’s biosphere lays the foundation for the laws of the general economy, which also constitutes an economy inclusive of a general ecology: a tragic vision of Gaia and Dionysos. Finally, poetry is considered, as a way we might reconnect with the universe and stimulate ecological imagination. (shrink)

기존의 생태철학에서, 환경 위기의 원인이 인간과 자연의 분리에 있으므로, 위기를 극복하기 위해선 인간과 자연의 친화가 필요하다고 한다. 우리는 동양사상이야말로 그런 합일성의 전형이라고 주장해 왔다. 실제로 동양의 전통문화 중에는 생태적 의의를 갖고 있는 사상적 내용이 적지 않게 들어있다. 그러나 현대 사회에서 그것이 얼마만큼의 활력과 의미를 갖고 있는지는 말하기 쉽지 않다. 다른 한 편으로 우리가 환경파괴의 주범이라고 생각하고 있는 서양의 사상이 생각만큼 반생태적인 내용을 담고 있지 않을 수도 있다. 따라서 우리는 좀 더 근본적인 곳에서부터 문제를 제기하고 답을 찾아 나가기 위해 “서양의 자연관은 (...) 반생태적인가?”라는 물음과 “동양의 자연관은 생태적인가?”라는 물음을 던지고 이에 대해 다시 검토해 볼 필요성이 있다. 특히 전자의 물음에 대해서는 적지 않은 연구가 있었기 때문에 후자의 물음에 대해 주목할 필요가 있으며 그에 대한 해답을 제시할 수 있다면 동양 생태 사상의 현대적 전환과 실천적 의의를 찾을 수 있는 단초를 제공하게 될 것이라 생각한다. 생태문제는 이론의 문제라기보다는 실천의 문제이다. 어떻게 실천을 가능하게 할 것인가의 문제이다. 개인과 국가, 기업 모두 어떻게 사는 것이 궁극적으로 가치 있는 삶인지 자각하지 못한다면 생태문제의 해결은 요원하다. 한 사람만의 자각으로는 해결이 불가능하며 생태문화의 사회적 조성과 교육이 동반되어야 한다. 이 과정에서 전통적인 환경 이해 방식과 사상을 비판적으로 고찰하고 객관적으로 바라봐야 할 필요성이 생기는 것이다. 동양 전통 문화가 담고 있는 풍부한 생태 사상적 요소의 보편적 가치는 그것이 현대적으로 전환될 수 있는 가능성을 실현시켜 줄 수 있는 기초가 된다. 그러나 보편적 가치만으로 그것이 현대적 이론으로 전환되어 실천과 연결될 수 있는지는 별도의 문제이다. 앞에서 언급했던 것처럼 생태 사상은 이론 문제이기 이전에 실천문제이다. 아무리 훌륭하고 잘 갖추어진 이론이라 할지라도 실천과 연결될 수 있는 현실적 길을 찾지 못한다면 그것은 아무 쓸모가 없는 것이다. 그러나 동양 전통 생태사상이 현대적으로 전환될 수 있는 가능성은 얼마든지 있다. 앞에서도 말했듯이 생태사상의 문제는 이론뿐만 아니라 실천이 병행되어야 하는 것이며, 과거의 문제가 아니라 현재의 문제이기 때문에 미리 답안을 정해놓고 문제를 검토하는 것이 아닌 오늘날의 입장에서 끊임없이 새로운 문제를 제시하고 답안을 찾으려 할 때 동양 생태사상의 현대적 전환은 어느 정도 가능성을 보게 될 것이다. (shrink)

“Every practice is a mode of thought, already in the act. To dance: a thinking in movement. To paint: a thinking through color. To perceive in the everyday: a thinking of the world’s varied ways of affording itself.” —from _Thought in the Act _Combining philosophy and aesthetics, _Thought in the Act_ is a unique exploration of creative practice as a form of thinking. Challenging the common opposition between the conceptual and the aesthetic, Erin Manning and Brian Massumi “think through” (...) a wide range of creative practices in the process of their making, revealing how thinking and artfulness are intimately, creatively, and inseparably intertwined. They rediscover this intertwining at the heart of everyday perception and investigate its potential for new forms of activism at the crossroads of politics and art. Emerging from active collaborations, the book analyzes the experiential work of the architects and conceptual artists Arakawa and Gins, the improvisational choreographic techniques of William Forsythe, the recent painting practice of Bracha Ettinger, as well as autistic writers’ self-descriptions of their perceptual world and the experimental event making of the SenseLab collective. Drawing from the idiosyncratic vocabularies of each creative practice, and building on the vocabulary of process philosophy, the book reactivates rather than merely describes the artistic processes it examines. The result is a thinking-with and a writing-in-collaboration-with these processes and a demonstration of how philosophy co-composes with the act in the making. _Thought in the Act_ enacts a collaborative mode of thinking in the act at the intersection of art, philosophy, and politics. (shrink)

In a time imbued with civilisation crisis, José Manuel Naredo's work is of particular relevance. Naredo, one of the most prestigious economists in Spain and a pioneer of ecological economics, first published his most popular book ( La economía en evolución. Historia y perspectivas de las categorías básicas del pensamiento económico) in 1987. This article reviews its most recent and updated version released in 2015. Beyond a brilliant criticism of neoclassical economics, he discusses the underlying ideology and implications of (...) the notion of economic system uncritically endorsed by most schools of economic thought. Transcending the usual dichotomy between ‘orthodox’ and ‘heterodox’ economics, Naredo calls for an economic transition built on the integration of different kinds of scientific knowledge as well as other intuitive, metaphysical and ethical fields in favour of a truly inclusive economics. This is, he warns us, a sine qua non for a socioecological transformation to flourish. (shrink)

This book examines the relationship between environmental and democratic thought and the apparent compatibility of ecology and democracy. Although environmental politics is quite rightly seen as a progressive force, it has also featured a strand of extreme right "eco-authoritarianism" and its proponents have sometimes developed controversial positions on such issues as population policy. There have also been a number of situations where radical environmental activists have broken the laws of democratic societies in pursuit of ecological objectives and the (...) book examines this in a number of case studies on biotechnology, genetic engineering and biodiversity. This is a significant contribution to the literature on environmental politics, ecological thought and democracy. (shrink)

This book provides a conceptual basis for recognizing the classroom as an ecology of linguistic and cultural patterns that should be taken into account as part of the teacher's professional decision making. It argues that the orchestration of classroom behaviour cannot be separated from the mental ecology of metaphor and thought patterns that reflect the student's primary culture. Chapters discuss the metaphorical nature of language and thought, primary socilization, nonverbal communication, framing and social control, the classroom as an (...) ecology of power, culturally responsive supervision, and educating teachers for the 21st century - all from a cultural and linguistic point of view. (shrink)

Not man as the king of creation, but rather as the being who is in intimate contact with the profound life of all forms or all types of beings, who is responsible for even the stars and animal life, and who ceaselessly plugs an organ-machine into an energy-machine, a tree into his body, a breast into his mouth, the sun into his asshole: the eternal custodian of the machines of the universe. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 4.

Smith outlines the distinctive features of ecological thought and examines two contentious areas of environmental ethics, the obligations for present generations and the relationship of humans to non-human animals.

To overcome “digital reductionism,” a new kind of mechanical view on human beings, fundamental informatics provides some critical viewpoints. It regards information as “meaning” generated in living things which do not exist alone but are parts of ecological system. On the other hand, V. E. Frankl proposed two dimensions of humans: homo sapiens and homo patiens. The latter is the essential aspect of humans whose essence is “compassion,” while the former is the nature like a mechanical machine. As features (...) of living things, unrestricted ability of interpretation as well as inseparable relationships between others underlies both in Frankl’s thought and fundamental informatics. This viewpoint can be applied to the concept of “information literacy.”. (shrink)

In the context of network-ecological thought, information ethics is perhaps best understood as a transversal reflexive practice, aimed at identifying the stakes attending the creation, consumption, and disposal of infor-mation technologies. To situate itself as well as potential interlocutors, such a thought requires correspondingly complex cartographies, a multidimensional mapping of practices and presuppositions, of individual, collective, institutional actors as well as the conditions of possibility of their mutual engagement. Such cartographies do not assume the existence of the (...) „local“ or the „global“ as a given. Instead, they attend to the way human and non-human actors and the discursive and material practices they are involved in contribute to construction and reconstruction of geocultural formations. Reapproached from within such a „network-ecological“ horizon, information ethics becomes geophilosophy, generating new modalities of intervention in the conflictual dynamics associated with the social-economic life of waste. (shrink)

O artigo discute o impacto do pensamento tardio de Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) nas linhas gerais do pensamento ecológico atual, o qual, em tese, aproximar-se-ia da crítica do autor alemão ao fenômeno da Gestell. De fato, embora em alguns aspectos se aproxime e em outros se distancie do projeto original de Heidegger, essa discussão ressoa em alguns autores contemporâneos, como Michel Maffesoli e Félix Guattari. Nesse sentido, o trabalho visa demonstrar até onde a crítica de Heidegger ao fenômeno da Gestell repercute (...) nessa esfera de atuação da Ecosofia, que, em termos gerais, busca resgatar uma relação pluridimensional (estética-política-social-ambiental) entre o ser humano e a eco (oikos) natural. (shrink)

Ecology and Human Emancipation Tim Hayward Humanism vs Prometheanism The entry of ecological considerations into political thought raises new questions about the meaning of human emancipation.* In particular, traditional socialist conceptions of emancipation as a move from a sphere of...

The enactive and ecological approaches to embodied cognitive science are on a collision course. While both draw inspiration from similar views in psychology and phenomenology, the two approaches initially held seemingly contradictory views and points of focus. Early enactivists saw value in the ecological approach but insisted that the two schools remain distinct. While ecological psychology challenged the common foes of mental representation and mind-body dualism, it seemingly did so at the cost of the autonomy of the (...) agent. This is evidence that the early enactive and ecological approaches told different stories about how agents and environments interact. Whereas the enactive approach broadly focuses on agency and the organism’s resilience to environmental perturbations, the ecological approach insists that organisms are best understood in terms of the organism–environment system and at the ecological scale. Historically, this tension created space for harsh criticisms from both sides and for some ecological psychologists to dismiss enactivism altogether. Despite their differences, both approaches use dynamic systems theory to explain the interactions between embodied agents and the environment or contextual milieu in which they are embedded. This has led some scholars to focus on the complementary elements of each approach and argue that the two schools are allies, thus rejecting the historical disagreements between the two approaches and calling for an ecological–enactive synthesis. The attempts to synthesize the approaches are noteworthy and should be considered steps in the right direction but are potentially problematic. If the two schools are merely synthesized to some form of ecological–enactivism, then something of value from both approaches could be lost. This is analogous to the hasty comparison between two seemingly similar schools of thought found in early attempts at East-West comparative philosophy. I argue that the relationship between the enactive and ecological approaches is both complementary and contrary and is thus best understood in terms of complementarity. Given the complexity of complementarity I will unpack the notion in steps. I will begin with the exploration of analogous concepts in Japanese Philosophy and gradually build a lens through which both agent environment and ecological enactive complementarities can be understood. (shrink)

This essay explores connections between Charles Darwin’s thinking and the writings of theorists in the deep ecology movement. It begins by placing Darwin’s thought in the context of Western attempts to reject teleological descriptions of nature. It then shows that while some authors cite Darwin’s naturalistic view of human origins as a positive contribution to deep ecological thought, the fact that his work also helped eliminate teleological explanations of natural phenomena is problematic for non-anthropocentric environmental ethics. Because (...) of this, the argument is made that the significance of Darwin’s work for deep ecology theorists is not simply that it views humans as a part of nature, but that it asserts a basic continuity between humans and other living things. The essay concludes by suggesting that an outlook grounded in a Darwinian sense of continuity does not necessarily issue in a strictly bio-centric understanding of nature’s value. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The Death of Nature offered a promising bridge between the history of ecological thought, a subject of the history of science, and the history of environmental change, the purview of environmental history. Such bridging was an ambitious goal, hindered, as this essay argues, by the histories and politics of academic disciplines and their publics. Directions in both the history of science and environmental history, as well as the current political climate in the United States, make today an (...) opportune moment once again to explore productive places of exchange that The Death of Nature invited us to consider twenty‐five years ago. (shrink)

The article discusses the ecological aspects of John Milbank’s thought in the context of the growing climate crisis. For this purpose, the concept of integral ecology is interpreted in the spirit of Milbank’s integralism, which rejects the notion of “pure nature” as a manifestation of secularism and calls for theological grounding of the environmental discourse. This perspective allows us to see the limitations of the modern way of thinking, caught up in the metaphors of “conquest of nature” and (...) “return to nature.” As an alternative, the concept of “kenotic anthropocentrism” is proposed, which sees man as a rational, social, creative and religious animal, that somehow transcends his own nature, being called to union with God. On the one hand, such an approach proclaims the ontological superiority of man over other creatures, and on the other, it reminds us of his role as the guardian—and not the owner—of the Earth. Thus, it differs significantly from Clive Hamilton’s “modest anthropocentrism,” whose call to care for the environment is ultimately based on arbitrary freedom and the imperative of self-preservation. Milbank’s position is closer to Bruno Latour’s anthropocentrism emphasizing the role of man as a political representative of silent earthlings—rivers, mountains and animals. However, Milbank advocates a strong ontological hierarchy rejected by Latour, which makes him less sensitive to the material dimension of climate change. Moreover, Milbank’s militant anti-secularism may be an obstacle to a much needed broader discussion of the ecological crisis, even if his critique of modernity is hard to ignore. (shrink)

허먼 데일리는 생태경제학의 대부로 불린다. 그 이유는 그가 1960년대 후반부터 오늘에 이르기까지 줄곧 생태경제학자로서의 길을 걸어오면서 이 분야의 기초를 다져놓았기 때문이다. 데일리의 생태경제사상의 핵심은 이른바 ‘정상상태’ 경제론이라 할 수 있다. 정상상태 경제란 원료 투입량을 최저 비율로 유지함으로써 전체 인구와 물질적 부의 축적이 항상 어떤 바람직한 수준을 유지하는 경제로 정의된다. 데일리도 한때는 경제성장을 강조하는 성장론자의 한 사람이었다. 이러한 데일리의 관점을 전환하는 데는 3명의 학자가 큰 영향을 끼친 것으로 판단된다. 그 3명의 학자란 밀(J.S. Mill), 볼딩(K.E. Boulding) 그리고 조제스쿠-뢰겐(N. Georgescu-Roegen)을 가리킨다. 본 연구의 (...) 주 목적은 데일리의 정상상태 경제론이 형성되는 데 큰 영향을 끼친 것으로 여겨지는 3인의 학자의 주장을 살펴보는 데 있다. (shrink)