Students today are habitual users of digital technology. However, they do not examine the nature of their relationship with technology. Even though we are all enduring severe environmental crises including the COVID-19 pandemic, our students do not appear to see the interrelated connections between the environmental crisis and themselves. A case in point is that they have difficulty drawing a connection between environmental crises and their participation in industrial civilization. This is why it is necessary to consider technological literacy seriously (...) for our environmental education. This study seeks to investigate an alternative way to set up the relation of technology for the current environmental education by comparing the views of Heidegger and Latour on technology. Even though the question of the two thinkers starts from the same critics of the instrumentality of technology, their strategies to overcome it are quite different. While Heidegger suggests a human-centered relationship between humans and technology, Latour criticizes the limitation of this approach and maintains that more symmetrical relations with technology are needed as a form of a network between human and nonhuman actors. In this paper, I argue for the urgency of cultivating a sense of connection for our students’ technological literacy in this environmental crisis. For that purpose, I insist Latour’s advice for teachers and researchers to be considered more seriously to encourage students to take symmetrical relationship with technology in these aggravating environmental crises. (shrink)

This paper outlines the fundamental aspects of a Heideggerian-ecofeminist philosophy. It aims to be suggestive rather than definitive regarding the form and function of such a philosophy and will, consequently, be somewhat partial and incomplete. It is intended to highlight the enormous potential of such a hybrid philosophy. To this end it will provide a brief account of the philosophy of the later Heidegger, with particular emphasis on his analysis of technology and his account of the Greek concept of truth (...) as aletheia, or unconcealment. It will also focus on Heidegger’s account of the connection between the Greek concept of nature as physis and his own ontology of Being, “letting-be” as the appropriate attitudinal stance to existence, and the bearing of all the above on contemporary ecological concerns. (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss Næss’s concept of ecological self in light of the process of identification and the idea of self-realization, in order to understand the asymmetrical relationship among human beings and nature. In this regard, our hypothesis is that Næss does not use the concept of the ecological self to justify ontology of processes, or definitively overcome the idea of individual entities in view of a transpersonal ecology, as Fox argues. Quite the opposite: Næss’s ecological self is nothing (...) but an echo of the theme of the home and of belonging to a place, and, therefore, it deals with a positive relationship of the individual with its environment. This allows us to reshape environmental ethics starting from environmental ontology, and recalling the primacy of the latter on the former: the very theoretic background of an ethical view might only be a suitable interpretation of human nature and properties, starting from a relational viewpoint that may help understanding us our asymmetrical relationships with the world. (shrink)

_Explores the evolution of Heidegger’s thinking about nature and its relevance for environmental ethics._.