Ecological humanism is a new broadened form of human ethics that coming into being as an answer to an ecological crisis and an ideology of total consumption. There are two approaches in basing of ecological humanism. The first of them is founded on traditional human values or on anthropocentrism. Milieu is considered as important living conditions that must be conserved with great care but the number of one is man here. The second approach is more (...) radical. It strives to overcome anthropological egoism and is based on Earth-altruism. Its credo can be presented as general weal for all geobiocoenosis. Good is all that helps to preserve integrity, stability and beauty of Earth-community. Stable development can be defined as safeguarding of human living inharmony with ecological systems. As it is well known, 57-th session of UNO announced that 2005-2014 years will be devoted to a program of education for stable development. The Mongolian Government asseverated a national program of ecological education for Mongolia from 1997. Its main object was a forming of common ecological culture for stable development. This program provided:‐ ecological training for common life‐ laying organizing structures and law grounds‐ co-ordinating tacks of stable development with other national projects‐ including ecological knowledge in educational programs.We think also that there is need to elaborate new human ethics that could provide new common living culture for Mongols. There is ecological ethics or ecological humanism that, above all, will remove a tradition of human predominance over nature and establish equality between human beings and animate nature. (shrink)

Addresses Ming Dynasty philosopher Wang Fuzhi’s neo-Confucianism from the perspective of contemporary ecological humanism. In this novel engagement with Ming Dynasty philosopher Wang Fuzhi (1619–1692), Nicholas S. Brasovan presents Wang’s neo-Confucianism as an important theoretical resource for engaging with contemporary ecological humanism. Brasovan coins the term “person-in-the-world” to capture ecological humanism’s fundamental premise that humans and nature are inextricably bound together, and argues that Wang’s cosmology of energy (qi) gives us a rich conceptual vocabulary (...) for understanding the continuity that exists between persons and the natural world. The book makes a significant contribution to English-language scholarship on Wang Fuzhi and to Chinese intellectual history, with new English translations of classical Chinese, Mandarin, and French texts in Chinese philosophy and culture. This innovative work of comparative philosophy not only presents a systematic and comprehensive interpretation of Wang’s thought but also shows its relevance to contemporary discussions in the philosophy of ecology. “This is a fine study of Wang Fuzhi’s complex and fascinating neo-Confucian cosmology. I learned an immense amount about one of China’s last great Confucian intellectuals.” — John Berthrong, author of Expanding Process: Exploring Philosophical and Theological Transformations in China and the West. (shrink)

My thesis is based on the methodological assumption that the Analects of Confucius should be interpreted within the greater context of the Four Books, Five Classics, Xunzi, and works of Neo-Confucian literati. Here I argue that the Analects can be consistently modeled as an environmental ethics of weak anthropocentrism so long as it is read according to two provisos: first, that “weak anthropocentrism” be used in its standard sense in the context of contemporary environmental ethics, and, second, that the hermeneutic (...) method of situating the Analects within the system of the Four Books, Five Classics, Xunzi, and Song-Ming Confucian texts be suspended. As soon as the hermeneutic suspension required by the second... (shrink)

Seeking an alternative metaphysical view to anthropocentrism, which problematically places humans at the center of nature, Brasovan brings together the Neo-Confucian Wang Fuzhi’s account with ecological humanism. He aims to contribute a view of humans and nature that consists of continuous, dynamic and complex systems. Through critically engaging Brasovan’s account, I discuss Wang’s anti-anthropocentric metaphysics, his qi monism, and the spiritual side of his philosophy. I then criticize Brasovan’s project on two accounts: his categorization of Wang’s qi monism (...) as materialism (with provisos) and his lack of discussion of anthropocentric concepts in Wang’s philosophy. Lastly, I draw the reader’s attention to the rich resources presented by Wang, who witnesses and partakes in the interaction amongst the Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist traditions; I also emphasize the significance and promises brought by Brasovan’s approach of engaging Neo-Confucian thinkers with modern philosophical concerns such as the demand of ecological humanism. (shrink)

The idea that humans are clearly distinguished from other animals and from the natural world in general is a cornerstone of European philosophy and culture at least from the sixteenth century onward. Often, this idea is related to understandings of ‘humanism’ that emerged in that period and legitimized regimes of power and control over non-European cultures; it also sanctioned the exploitation of the natural world in the form of extractive capitalism. Critiques of Eurocentric mindsets hinge on certain understandings of (...) ‘humanism,’ arguing for a transformation or even abandoning of humanist traditions in the sense of ‘posthumanism’ or ‘critical posthumanities.’ In their selective interpretation of European humanism—exemplified with Immanuel Kant’s philosophy—the current critique shows elements of an Occidentalist construction of humanism. If we want to overcome the idea that humans—and within that group particularly the white, male, educated Europeans—are the ‘masters of the world,’ we are confronted with conceptual challenges that need philosophical and theoretical reflection. The ontological and epistemological implications of non-anthropocentric ways of thinking and knowing provide a clear alternative to some problematic aspects of European philosophy and humanism. Engaging with new interpretations of other-than-human agency, relational understandings of animism, and intra-active production of knowledge can provide a relevant contribution to the ongoing discussion across intellectual, cultural, and political fields, an approach that takes the specificity of human animals seriously without identifying them as the center of knowledge and power. (shrink)

With an increasing number of individuals living with chronic illness and pain, integrative approaches offering self-management support are needed. This book proposes a multi-layered framework integrating the body/self/environment that cultivates wholeness as an authentic embodied presence in alignment with a reflexive self.

The article engages the current debate between humanistic' and anti-humanistic' alternatives for an ecological philosophy by putting Heidegger and Hegel into dialogue. It is argued that Heidegger's portrait of Hegel's philosophy as a form of humanism' which foreshadows the modern logic of domination and exploitation of nature is highly misleading. Hegel's humanistic' position can allow for a genuinely ecological vision of nature, which, while not as radically ecological as Heidegger's, may in fact avoid some of the (...) problems of Heidegger's view. (shrink)

Qualitative Complexity offers a critique of the humanist paradigm in contemporary social theory. Drawing from sources in sociology, philosophy, complexity theory, 'fuzzy logic', systems theory, cognitive science and evolutionary biology, the authors present a new series of interdisciplinary perspectives on the sociology of complex, self-organizing structures.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Old Orders for New Ecology, Animal Rights, and the Poverty of HumanismCary Wolfe (bio)Luc Ferry. The New Ecological Order. Trans. Carol Volk. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.1Early on in The New Ecological Order, the French philosopher Luc Ferry characterizes the allure and danger of ecology in the postmodern moment. What separates it from various other issues in the intellectual and political field, he writes, is thatit (...) can call itself a true “world vision,” whereas the decline of political utopias, but also the parcelization of knowledge and the growing “jargonization” of individual scientific disciplines, seemed to forever prohibit any plan for the globalization of thought.... At a time when ethical guide marks are more than ever floating and undetermined, it allows the unhoped-for promise of rootedness to form, an objective rootedness, certain of a new moral ideal.[xx]As we shall see, for Ferry—a staunch liberal humanist in the Kantian if not quite Cartesian tradition—this vision conceals a danger to which contemporary European intellectuals are especially sensitive: not holism, nor even moralism, exactly, but that far more charged and historically freighted thing, totalitarianism. Ferry’s concern is that such “world visions,” incarnated in contemporary environmentalism in movements such as Deep Ecology and ecofeminism, threaten “[o]ur entire democratic culture,” which “since the French Revolution, has been marked, for basic philosophical reasons, by the glorification of uprootedness, or innovation” [xxi]. Ferry’s thesis—it becomes quite explicit in his comparison of environmental legislation under the Third Reich with tenets of Deep Ecology in the book’s second section—is that Deep Ecology and its ilk have moved in to occupy the space left open by the passing of the political imaginaries of fascism and communism, so that denunciations of liberalism (and its corollary in political praxis, reformism) may now be unmasked for what they are: critiques “in the name of nostalgia, or, on the contrary, in that of hope: either the nostalgia for a lost past, for national identity flouted by the culture of rootlessness, or revolutionary hope in a radiant future, in a classless and free society” [xxvi]. To which Ferry responds—literally—“Grow up!” Late in the book, he tells us that we must see through “the adult development of the secular and democratic universe” [137] by rejecting totalizing revolutionary visions of the sort purveyed by Deep Ecology, and by adhering instead to liberal reformism, “the only [End Page 21] position consistent with leaving the world of childhood” [138].Ferry is certainly right to draw our attention to the often uncritical nostalgia and romantic holism of some varieties of environmental thought—problems that have been noted before by critics from points on the map very different politically from Ferry’s avowed liberal humanism. And it is certainly understandable, given the historical context, that he would join a long list of other European intellectuals in pointing out the manifold dangers to democratic society of totalizing moral schemes—dangers often represented for liberal intellectuals like Ferry by the rise of the Greens in European politics. 1 We do well to remember, too (as Fredric Jameson and others have pointed out), that for European intellectuals such as Ferry, liberalism retains, for understandable historical reasons, a viability and a promise about which many American intellectuals are skeptical or even jaded. European intellectuals, conditioned by the experience of fascist authoritarianism and the strong but problematic presence historically of the Communist party in social and intellectual life, may find in liberalism a refreshing and indeed radical democratic openness and dynamism, while American intellectuals, conditioned to the absence of any other major political contenders, have long since grown accustomed to liberalism as the name for that “end of ideology” position which, as Jameson puts it, “can function more effectively after its own death as an ideology, realizing itself in its most traditional form as a commitment to the market system that has become sheer common sense and no longer a political program” [249, my emphasis].But in defending democratic difference, everything hinges, of course, on precisely how such terms are framed and how difference is articulated—an index of which often may be found in how its imagined... (shrink)

Traditionally, Sociology has identified its subject matter as a distinct set - social phenomena - that can be taken as quite different and largely disconnected from potentially relevant disciplines such as Psychology, Economics or Planetary Ecology. Within Sociology and Human Ecology, Smith and Jenks argue that this position is no longer sustainable. Indeed, exhorting the reader to confront human ecology and its relation to the physical and biological environments, Smith and Jenks suggest that the development of understanding with regards to (...) the position occupied by the social requires, in turn, an extension of the component disciplines and methodologies of a 'new' human socio-ecology. Aiming to evoke critical change to the possibility, status and range of the social sciences whilst also offering essential grounding for inter-disciplinary engagement, Sociology and Human Ecology will appeal to postgraduate students and postdoctoral researchers interested in fields such as Social Theory, Socio-Biology and Ecological Economics. (shrink)

Global health and environmental wellbeing are mutually reinforcing and interdependent. This mutuality invokes two major analytical orientations: it emphasizes a direct nexus between ecological strategies and global health outcomes. These in turn revitalize the essential quest for comprehensive policies and responsible strategies for enhancing both ecology and health within the discourse of sustainability. With orientation towards political conception of corporate responsibility, I problematize the root questions of the democratic embeddedness of the firm under conditions of weakened institutional structures. I (...) highlight the inherent power relations in global health and ecological governance through literature mapping. I address the question: Why and how might ecological strategies be embedded in corporate day-to-day actions to produce optimal outcomes that have positive effects on global health and human dignity? Besides resource and ethical/political constraints, there are several micro-political, geopolitical, industrial, institutional and structural impediments to ecological and health sustainability. This grim diagnosis is clearly a description of a ‘disturbingly fascinating’ pathology of global capitalism whose industrial effects culminate in the accumulation of more profits for a few at the expense of the ecological sustainability of the majority. That notwithstanding, there are several grounds for optimism with a move from anthropocentrism to humanistic eco-centrism via deliberative democratic procedures. Here, the centrality of human dignity is emphasized. This study provides an interdisciplinary theoretical model that seeks to reorient strategies towards restoration, protection, mitigation, adaptation, harm avoidance and innovative sustainability of the whole economic gamut and biodiversity that supports global health. Thus, I rearticulate ecological sustainability in terms of its most fundamental means and end: sustainable global health and the tutelage of human dignity. (shrink)

(1994). From Cassandra to Gaia: The limits of civic humanism in a post‐ecological world. Social Epistemology: Vol. 8, Public Indifference to Population Issues, pp. 243-259.

중국 전통 ‘禮’ 문화에는 인문정신과 생태균형 사상이 함께 어우러져 하나를 이룬다. ‘禮’ 문화에는 절도와 조절이 있고, 음양의 균형과 조화가 강조되며, 그리고 禮의 구분과 樂의 조화로움은 은연중에 생태 조화의 사상에 부합한다. 그 生生의 덕과 仁愛와 배려의 정신은 사회윤리의 기초이고 중요 내용이며, 우주질서와 생태윤리의 핵심이다. ‘禮’ 문화 가운데의 생태윤리는 소박한 생태의식으로서 인류의 생존 발전 과정의 자연스런 생태윤리의 구현이자, 전통적인 음양사상의 ‘摩’와 ‘蕩’이 서로 어우러지는 변증법적인 사유의 결과이며, 동시에 그 인문 도덕정신이 우주로 확대되어 나가는 필연적인 산물이다. 그러므로 현대적인 관점에서 보더라도 여전히 눈부시게 빛나며 (...) 더욱 소중한 전통이다. (shrink)

Written as a series of lectures, The Ecological Life offers a humanistic perspective on environmental philosophy that challenges some of the dogmas of deep ecology and radical environmentalism while speaking for their best desires. The book argues that being human-centered leaves us open to ecological identifications, rather than the opposite. Bendik-Keymer draws on analytic and continental traditions of philosophy as well as literature and visual media. He argues for a sense of ecological justice consonant with human rights, (...) and shows how humanistic thinking is committed to deepening respect for life and our ecological orientation. In a clear, jargon-free and conversational tone, The Ecological Life presents a timely and important contribution to civic engagement in an ecological century. (shrink)

The authors critique C. A. Bowers' argument that education for sustainability must be inspired by the practices of pre-modern cultures, and cannot be promoted through the postmodern pragmatism of Richard Rorty. Environmental education must rather be grounded in contemporary cultural practice. Although Rorty, like many other postmodernists, has shown little concern for the ecological crisis, his approach is potentially applicable to it. What is required is a broadening of focus: the ecological crisis is a crisis of post-Enlightenment (...) class='Hi'>humanism as well as of other aspects of modernity. (shrink)

The thesis of this paper is, first, that ecological thinking—which takes its point of departure from specifically located, multifaceted analyses of knowledge production and circulation in diverse demographic and geographic locations—can generate more responsible knowings than the reductivism of the positivist post-Enlightenment legacy allows; and second, that ecological thinking can spark a revolution comparable to Kant’s Copernican revolution, which recentered western thought by moving “man” to the center of the philosophical-conceptual universe. Kantian philosophy was parochial in the conception (...) of “man” on which it turned: a recognition central to feminist, Marxist, post-colonial and critical race theory. It promoted a picture of a physical and human world centered on and subservient to a small class and race of men who were uniformly capable of achieving a narrowly-conceived standard of reason, citizenship, and morality. As humanism vied with theism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so ecological thinking vies with capitalism at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Here I outline its promise. (shrink)

Curren and Metzger’s work makes a bold, normative claim: The moral goal of sustainability is human flourishing. Their eudaimonic theory has as its summum bonum ‘living well’ according to the fundam...

The authors critique C. A. Bowers' argument that education for sustainability must be inspired by the practices of pre-modern cultures, and cannot be promoted through the postmodern pragmatism of Richard Rorty. Environmental education must rather be grounded in contemporary cultural practice. Although Rorty, like many other postmodernists, has shown little concern for the ecological crisis, his approach is potentially applicable to it. What is required is a broadening of focus: the ecological crisis is a crisis of post-Enlightenment (...) class='Hi'>humanism as well as of other aspects of modernity. (shrink)

Through specific readings and uses of Deleuze’s conceptual apparatus, this volume examines the operation of human-actioned systems as complex and heterogeneous arenas of affection and accountability.

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 thesis of this paper is, first, that ecological thinking—which takes its point of departure from specifically located, multifaceted analyses of knowledge production and circulation in diverse demographic and geographic locations—can generate more responsible knowings than the reductivism of the positivist post-Enlightenment legacy allows; and second, that ecological thinking can spark a revolution comparable to Kant’s Copernican revolution, which recentered western thought by moving “man” to the center of the philosophical-conceptual universe. Kantian philosophy was parochial in the conception (...) of “man” on which it turned: a recognition central to feminist, Marxist, post-colonial and critical race theory. It promoted a picture of a physical and human world centered on and subservient to a small class and race of men who were uniformly capable of achieving a narrowly-conceived standard of reason, citizenship, and morality. As humanism vied with theism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so ecological thinking vies with capitalism at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Here I outline its promise. (shrink)

Design for Values (DfV) philosophies are a series of design approaches that aim to incorporate human values into the early phases of technological design to direct innovation into beneficial outcomes. The difficulty and necessity of directing advantageous futures for transformative technologies through the application and adoption of value-based design approaches are apparent. However, questions of whose values to design are of critical importance. DfV philosophies typically aim to enrol the stakeholders who may be affected by the emergence of such a (...) technology. However, regardless of which design approach is adopted, all enrolled stakeholders are human ones who propose human values. Contemporary scholarship on metahumanisms, particularly those on posthumanism, have decentred the human from its traditionally privileged position among other forms of life. Arguments that the humanist position is not (and has never been) tenable are persuasive. As such, scholarship has begun to provide a more encompassing ontology for the investigation of nonhuman values. Given the potentially transformative nature of future technologies as relates to the earth and its many assemblages, it is clear that the value investigations of these design approaches fail to account for all relevant stakeholders (i.e., nonhuman animals). This paper has two primary objectives: (1) to argue for the cogency of a posthuman ethics in the design of technologies; and (2) to describe how existing DfV approaches can begin to envision principled and methodological ways of incorporating non-human values into design. To do this, the paper provides a rudimentary outline of what constitutes DfV approaches. It then takes up a unique design approach called Value Sensitive Design (VSD) as an illustrative example. Out of all the other DfV frameworks, VSD most clearly illustrates a principled approach to the integration of values in design. (shrink)

The Humanism of the new era grew in a renaissance of hellenistic culture with the new trends in science and art coming into conflict with clerical dogmatism. Its decay has been caused by external factors (creation of national states and institutions) and by the internal development of science and philosophy; particularly the principle of objectivism separated science from ethics. The revival of humanism occured in defense of the principles of equality, freedom and universality against the militancy and dogmatism (...) of totalitarian parties. The danger of a total nuclear and ecological disaster has given to humanism the highest principle: the preservation of life. Humanism today is endowed by the mission to create the common basis for world-accord and -unity. (shrink)

The Humanism of the new era grew in a renaissance of hellenistic culture with the new trends in science and art coming into conflict with clerical dogmatism. Its decay has been caused by external factors (creation of national states and institutions) and by the internal development of science and philosophy; particularly the principle of objectivism separated science from ethics. The revival of humanism occured in defense of the principles of equality, freedom and universality against the militancy and dogmatism (...) of totalitarian parties. The danger of a total nuclear and ecological disaster has given to humanism the highest principle: the preservation of life. Humanism today is endowed by the mission to create the common basis for world-accord and -unity. (shrink)

How can businesses and business leaders contribute to solutions of the big ethical, social, and ecological challenges of today? Within this context this book offers theoretical and practical approaches to making the world a better place for existing and future generations. It uses diverse, often multidimensional frames of reference and illustrates them with real-life cases to show positive solutions. The author's broad professional background and humanistic worldview are reflected in his application of psychological and virtue-oriented theories as well as (...) philosophical approaches. Some of the articles have an essay format, others share his experiences and experiments in his ethics classes using roleplays to cultivate empathic and prudent ethical behaviour. A primary motivation of the book is to inspire leaders as well as teachers and students of leadership and business by enriching their worldviews to see ethics as a fundamental aspect at all levels of economic activity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 3-22 [Access article in PDF] Ecological Consciousness and the Symbol "God" 1 Gordon D. KaufmanHarvard UniversityI am a Christian theologian. This does not mean, however, that I understand my work as being essentially a matter of explaining and defending Christian faith and the Christian set of symbols for interpreting human life and the world. The task of the Christian theologian is rather, as I (...) understand it, to scrutinize carefully, critically evaluate, and reconstruct (in whatever ways seem appropriate and necessary) the central Christian symbols, so they will encourage and support a faith and life appropriate for today. 2 In our time it is no longer sufficient for theologians simply to take it for granted that the basic structure and commitments of traditional Christian faith are--in all of their main lines--right and proper; and to proceed, then, to expound and reinterpret them in whatever ways seem intelligible and persuasive. Whatever may have been the value and justification of this sort of theologizing in the past, the crises of the twentieth century (to many of which Christian symbols, institutions, and practices have themselves contributed) have made it clear that thorough reassessment of the traditional Christian symbol-system, with an eye to its (possibly drastic) reconstruction or even to the total rejection of some of its principal features, is required--if it is to continue to contribute to human well-being, and to the well-being of the rest of life, on planet Earth. It is with this thoroughly critical and open understanding of the task of Christian theologians today that this contribution to our Buddhist-Christian dialogue has been prepared. And I hope a similar spirit will animate the responses to this paper, whether offered from the Christian or the Buddhist side of our conversation. I My assignment here is to examine the topic of "Christianity and Ecology." This is, of course, a very broad topic, much too large for a paper of this sort. I have taken the liberty, therefore, to confine my discussion to only one of the many questions that might be considered under this heading. The central symbol in terms of which Christian faith and Christian life (as well as most other western religious traditions) understand and order themselves is God, usually thought of as designating the creator and governor of the world, the only One to whom unqualified devotion, love, [End Page 3] and service are due. If we can come to some understanding of how this symbol has functioned in the past, and might be conceived properly to function today with respect to ecological concerns, we will have made a large step toward understanding the overall topic of Christianity and ecology. I am devoting this paper, therefore, to the question of "Ecological Consciousness and the Symbol 'God.'"Throughout my professional life I have been concerned with the problem of the continuing viability (or lack of viability) in our contemporary world of the symbol "God," as that symbol has been understood through most of western history (not only by Christians and Jews, but also by many humanists and secularists). And for the last thirty years or so, I have been reflecting on the issues which our growing ecological consciousness poses for our understanding of--and our ordering of life in terms of--this symbol. My earliest writing directly concerned with this question is in a paper entitled "The Concept of Nature: A Problem for Theology" published in the Harvard Theological Review in 1972. 3 In that paper I attempted to show that there is a fundamental tension--indeed, a conceptual and logical incompatibility--between, on the one hand, the understanding of God, and of the intimate relation of humanity to God (as seen in our western religious and philosophical traditions), and on the other hand, our growing awareness that human existence is essentially constituted by, and could not exist apart from, the complex ecological ordering of life that has evolved on planet Earth over many millennia. 4The main emphasis in that paper remains largely correct in my view. Hence, I would like to... (shrink)

The always vexed relationships between philosophy, theory, methodology, empirical work and their representations and legitimations have been thrown into chaos with the belated acknowledgement of the Anthropocene. Unsurprisingly, traditional Western thought may have been complicit, given its underlying anthropocentric assumptions and humanist commitments in education philosophy, theory and practice. The postcritical knowledge ecology developed here is applied to both a modest and responsible form of methodological inquiry in an ethnographic study of nature experience. Our contextualised experiment adds to the nascent (...) literature of an environmentally oriented education now demanded in the Anthropocene. (shrink)

Phenomenological resources can be used to develop a nonanthropocentric theory of ecological values that gives rise to an obligation for moral agents. There is logical space in Edmund Husserl’s early theory of value that is inclusive of nonhuman animals and vegetation as members of a life community (Lebensgemeinschaft) possessing ecological characteristics. Within this legal space is a characterization of ecological obligation that is not tied to any single moral law, as it is in deontological ethics and utilitarianism, (...) but founded on the complex value nexus of a given ecological community. Rather than judging the “rightness” or “wrongness” of actions on the law-based and single-rule philosophical theories of normativity found in modern humanism, this Husserlian inspired account locates a conception of ecological obligation that is immanent to the values operative in a given environing world. This particular experience of ecological obligation arises when the valuation of the goods of individual members of the ecological community conflict with one another and the weighing of these competing goods is appropriately accomplished in light of a communal good. (shrink)

I argue that 'deep' ecology (as exemplified by the work of Arnie Naess) involves three inter-related commitments: (1) to an ethics of nature or axiological anti-humanism in which natural entities, processes or systems can possess intrinsic value independently of human beings; (2) a metaphysical naturalism or anti-humanism in which human beings are themselves conceptualized as natural products; (3) a transformative aspect. Although (3) is sometimes cast in personal or psychological terms, I think the idea can be given a (...) properly philosophical reconstruction along the lines of a kind of Ideologiekritik. I give the examples of Heidegger and Adorno to show how deeply our understanding of nature has been corrupted, and hence the depth of conceptual transformation required correctly to conceive nature. But both these thinkers simultaneously demonstrate a hostility to metaphysical naturalism and therefore have ultimately limited value for deep ecology. I then outline three possible relations of axiological to metaphysical commitments: (a) the abandonment of naturalism about values; (b) a projective or transcendentally idealist account of values; (c) an account of values as themselves lodged within the operation of natural systems. My reconstruction of the Ideologiekritiker shows them belonging to (b). So that if deep ecology is to avoid (a), it must embrace (c). Deleuze is much touted by environmental philosophers as contributing to (c). I argue that this is correct, but that the axiological commitments Deleuze manifests in his account of nature are ultimately quite different from those to which deep ecologists appear sympathetic. (shrink)

The celebrated western humanist tradition has its source in its early philosophical texts. In The Gift of Death, Derrida analyses the history of the emergence of ethical responsibility in the so-called Religions of the Book such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. While the humanist project helped itself through its conquest of the human sphere, it has served to upset the ecological balance and jeopardize sustainability. While searching for an inclusive vision for a sustainable, ethical perspective, Dōgen’s philosophy gains relevance (...) in the contemporary context. (shrink)

The relationship of man himself to his environment is an inseparable part of ecology; for he also is an organism and other organisms are a part of his environment. Ecology, therefore, broadly conceived and rightly understood, instead of being an academic science merely, out of touch with humanistic interests, is really that part of every other biological science which brings it into immediate relation to human kind. The proper place of humans in ecological study has been a recurring issue (...) for ecology. Of course humans are part of Nature writ large, but are they part of the ecologist's nature? The question bothered biologists even before the discipline of ecology was firmly institutionalized.... (shrink)

This article has a twofold aim. First it is shown, based on Joseph Christopher Greer’s earlier analysis, that there is a close historical, and to some extent substantial, affinity between deep ecology and esotericism. Greer’s findings will be corroborated by applying three different definitions of esotericism to the question at hand. Second, based on Sean McGrath’s ecophilosophy, it will be argued that utilizing esoteric influences systematically in deep ecological context can help deep ecology to avoid some problematic aspects it (...) is often accused of. Especially the esoteric conception of living nature can help deep ecology to bridge the gulf between nature and the human being, and thereby to avoid both theoretical and practical anti-humanism. (shrink)

A internationally renowned philosopher - Francois Laruelle - takes on the perennially important topic of what is means to be human and the place of humanity within ecological and post-humanism concerns.

The new Christian humanism is not about concepts and theories. It is a mystical experience of the centrality of Jesus Christ, of His face of mercy, of love given and delivered. Love is the gift that we must accept and respond to with love, especially with an ethic of love that makes us stand in solidarity with nature, with each other, and with the poor in a special way. We are a gift that is communicated. We must use the (...) resources of science, technology, and educational advances without fear, but always looking at human beings as the goal of our action. Everything is summarized in an integral ethic of loving care, in which women are experts and especially women religious in the church . (shrink)

In this essay I defend Heidegger’s critique of technology against possible criticisms that he may be an anti-humanist and a mystic. This essay will show that Heidegger’s critique of technology is helpful in thinking about ecological questions; and his contributions to such questions is relevant and not radically separated from some of the work of other philosophers today including Karen Warren and Marilyn Frye.

In her analyses of human ecological alienation, Val Plumwood implies that the recalcitrant problem of human exceptionalism is sustained in part by a kind of imaginative failure, by a certain blind spot to the ecological edibility of the human body. Among the many assumptions responsible for the blind spot, Plumwood suggests, is the liberal conception of the body as something proprietary, as something one owns. Plumwood’s work therefore establishes a new, if counterintuitive, task for environmental philosophy: to find (...) or create models of human embodiment that do not preempt but rather enable access to edibility. One such model can be found in Emmanuel Levinas’s late concept of the pre-egoic ethical body. This otherwise elusive and frequently neglected concept ought to be understood as a boldly materialist appropriation of Plotinian emanationism. So understood, it provides a path beyond the blind spot that Plumwood identifies. Taking up Levinas in this way opens a new path for environmental philosophy into his idiosyncratic thought—a path distinct, that is, from the standard extensionist maneuver of seeking nonhuman applications for his ultra-humanist notion of the face. (shrink)

The ecological crisis is related to religion that shapes the values, but its decisive factor is the inherent contradiction between the selfish logic of capital proliferation and the social public nature of the environment. The fundamental way to solve the ecological crisis is the domestic social reform, the coordination of international relations and the continuous development of science and technology. Guided by the social public agencies and scientific methods, religion can play a secondary constructive role in building the (...) pro-ecological humanistic environment. Contribution: It is as I have known perhaps the initial attempt to deal with the question between religion and conservation from the perspective of Marxism, as a response to the colleagues from the West. (shrink)

This paper discusses diverse practices across religions from a universalistic view. Various religions define their beliefs and rituals within an ecological context. Whether it is an Abrahamic, African or humanistic religion, they all have one ritual ground to facilitate their beliefs on. This ground takes the form of environmental or earth-based practices. Religious initiations and the history of spiritual leaders have illustrated that human spirituality is connected to nature and Mother Earth. In addition, Islam views contemplation about natural wonders (...) as an essential pathway to approach God. Despite the variety of religious traditions held, ecology is what universalizes all religions. (shrink)

An increasing number of academic papers, newspaper articles, and other media representations from all over the world recently bring climate change’s impact on mental health into focus. Commonly summarized under the terms of climate or ecological emotions, these reports talk about distress, anxiety, trauma, grief, or depression in relation to environmental decline and anticipated climate crisis. While the majority of psychology and mental health literature thus far presents preliminary conceptual analysis and calls for empirical research, some explanations of (...) class='Hi'>ecological emotions are already offered. They mainly draw from psychoanalysis and depth existential and humanistic psychology, as well as social psychology and address the relationship between ecological emotions and individual engagement in climate action. While these studies suggest building on individual resilience if concerned by ecological emotions, we argue that this only addresses their acute symptoms and not the social causes. Based upon our literature research, we show that in an individualistic society such as the liberal ones, feelings of individual responsibility are fostered, and this also applies to climate activism. (shrink)

Confucius is conventionally regarded as the founder of secular humanism and as a philosopher concerned about humans and culture. I would add to this that Confucius should also be read as an environmental philosopher. One reason is the pedagogical dimension in Confucianism, which points to Confucius as an environmental educator ? not the least of which since much of environmental education relies on common sense and an enlightened collective self-interest. Another reason is an aspect I call ?ecological intelligence?, (...) which is a key feature of ancient Confucianism and a signpost for the civil evolution that the mitigation of climate change demands from global civilization today. (shrink)

In growing recognition that the business community must play a key role in the global issues encapsulated by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, Babson College, which has a business-focused curriculum, has striven first to reinvent its teaching of ethics and then, particularly over the past decade, to enhance its focus on sustainability, social responsibility, and social entrepreneurship. As previous initiatives did not build sufficient linkages between the liberal arts, natural sciences, and business curriculum, the College is now engaged in (...) a far more comprehensive effort to educate our undergraduate business students in “integrated sustainability,” which it defines as “systems thinking that integrates ecological integrity, social responsibility, and value creation simultaneously.” By examining the meaning, skills, and pedagogical opportunities in systems thinking within the context of larger discussions on humanistic management, this article shows how systems thinking is a particularly fruitful way to ground business students in the natural sciences and the liberal arts, develop their complex problem-solving skills, and thereby reinvigorate management education in ways that prepares students to “render service to humanity.” Our hope is that sharing Babson College’s experience in this regard – both our successes and challenges - may provide useful insights to other faculty and academic leaders seeking to enhance humanistic management within their own higher education institutions. (shrink)

The work of Emmanuel Levinas has been both abundantly recognized and criticized in moral philosophy. This Janus-faced attitude is also present in ecological theories, which find fertile ground in Levinas’ thought without being able to explain its apparent anthropocentrism. Opposing hermeneutical paths tend to focus either on otherness as an absolute alterity, implying a potentially unlimited responsibility for all alterities, or on otherness as a re-foundation of humanism, leading to the conclusion that responsibility is unlimited only among humans. (...) Here I seek to disentangle Levinas from these two extreme interpretations, first by reviewing ecological readings of his philosophy, in both the Francophone and Anglophone spheres, and second by analyzing specific Levinasian terms that might be particularly helpful for a non-anthropocentric or deep ecology. The main results of this investigation are a distinction between the ethics of responsibility and the ethics of vulnerability, an explanation of Levinasian compulsory or methodological humanism, and a schematic model of sensibility as enjoyment/vulnerability capable of supporting deep ecology without the traditional notions of free will, rights, or values. (shrink)

Neo-Humanist Luc Ferry (1995) has compared deep ecology's declarations of intrinsic value in nature to the Third Reich's nature protection laws, which prohibit maltreatment of animals having "worth in themselves." Ferry's questionable approach fails to document the relationship between Nazi environmentalism and Nazi racism. German high art and mass media historically presented nature as dualistic, and portrayed Untermenschen as unnatural or inorganic. Nazi propaganda excluded Jews from nature, and identified traditional Jews as cruel to animals. Ferry's idealization of Humanism (...) under reports the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism in European thought, including the French Enlightenment. © 1999 Elsevier Science Inc. (shrink)

The first part (“Is there a future?”), discusses the idea of the future in the context of Carl Schmitt’s vision for the spatial revolutions of modernity, and then the idea of Anthropocene, as a synonym for an environmental crisis endangering the very survival of humankind. From this point of view, the conquest of space and the colonization of Mars at the center of futuristic and technocratic visions appear to be an attempt to escape from human responsibilities on Earth. The second (...) part (“AI and other hyperobjects”) discusses the extent of intellectual hubris expressed in computation, AI (Garvin Minsky e Ray Kurzweil), and the philosophy of computing and information (Eric Fredkin), involved in the elaboration of new theoretical assessments on the ultimate nature of reality. Their vision is then contrasted and made to interact with that of philosopher Timothy Morton. He has taken the perspective of global warming and the possibility of ecological catastrophe seriously, avoiding all the futuristic enthusiasms and instead emphasizing the radical nature of the transformations that humans experience in the present. In this perspective, AI becomes one of the “hyperobjects,” like the Internet or climate change, in which humans are immersed. Morton’s hyperobjects delineate an uncanny view of the future; this uncanniness is not related to the supernatural but to the environment. The third section (“More-than-human-humanism”) further reflects on the “uncanniness” that human perceive in the encounters with the manifestations of hyperobjects. It also seeks to understand the human position in the face of the radical technological transformations induced by cybernetics and AI. This section discusses Anti-humanism, Transhumanism, and Posthumanism within the broader category of more-than-human thought, which seems to be a more appropriate term to clarify the possible misunderstandings induced by the word “posthuman” and “transhuman.” The central question is not to empower (Transhumanism) or disempower (Posthumanism) humans, but to see them in relation to what is not human, including other animals, the environment, and the machine. The analysis considers the works of Cary Wolfe, Jane Bennet, Bryant Levi, among others, and introduces ethical debates on cyborgs, robots, and Autonomous weapons systems (AWS). The fourth section (“Ethical Perspectives”) continues this inquiry, concentrating on the non-standard ethical theories of Luciano Floridi (Computer and Information Ethics) and David Gunkel (The question of the Machine). It examines the opportunity and feasibility of including in the discussion on the ethics of our time - characterized by the pervasiveness of AI - the notions of consciousness as theorized by Emmanuel Levinas’s Humanism of the Other and Paul Ricoeur’s Oneself as Another. Finally, the last section (“The time of the end?”) reflects on how the hyperobject, Anthropocene, re-establishes a sense of limits in human history and confirms the special responsibility of human beings, and supports the need for a more-than-human-humanism. The latter, in other words, means intertwining ourselves with a unique ecosystem which cannot be overlooked and which restores meaning to our relationship with the past, present, and future. The awareness of the current challenges of technology can and must express itself in different forms of resistance to the adverse effects of AI in our lives. The ethical approach based on the persisting role of human consciousness is essential, but it must be coupled with human decision-making and political action. (shrink)

Unlike the free interpretations of Simondon’s genetic encyclopaedism, the constraining exegesis of this doctrine resolves the paradoxes that are essential for it to be constructed in its depth and subtlety. Now, at the root of these simple paradoxes lies what is no longer one, but which constitutes a true contradiction, of a methodological type. That is why today we need an encompassing refounding of Simondon’s genetic ontology, which makes it possible to eliminate the contradiction by transforming this ontology into a (...) translation of a new first problematic, called “archi-reflexive semantics.” Such is the program of the global but radically antidogmatic system of the individuation of sense, or “human ecology”, the ultimate telos of which is political-economic and articulates itself with a decentered humanism refounding the law outside ethics. (shrink)

There has been relatively little debate about Nietzsche’s place in environmental ethics, but the lines of the debate are well marked. He has been viewed as an anthropocentrist by Michael E. Zimmerman, a humanist by Ralph Acampora, a biocentrist and deep ecolo­gist by Max Hallman, a constructivist by Martin Drenthen, and an ecocentrist by Graham Parkes. Nietzsche does provide a theory of intrinsic value and his philosophy of nature is germane to an environmerntal ethic. His philosophical biology grounds his value (...) theory. The secondary literature contains three main claims plaguing the debate about his views. First, commentators tend to ignore or downplay Nietzsche’s biology. Second, his value theory is not adequatey addressed. Third, does Nietzsche’s emphasis on hierarchy enable him to maintain that human life is more valuable than that of other life forms, but that the lower life forms have a different kind of value insofar as they enable and support higher life forms? This view is roughly parallel in many respects to the views of Paul Taylor, David Ray Griffin, and Michael E. Zimmerman. (shrink)