Paul Tillich (1886-1965) is generally considered the most original and influential Christian theologian of the 20th century. What's not as widely recognized, outside of academic circles, is his stature as a first-rate existentialist philosopher—in the lineage of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Pascal. Few people have analyzed more areas of existence: from art and architecture to culture, science, economics, politics, technology, psychology, world religions (particularly Buddhism), history, and health and healing. But one of Tillich's primary and enduring concerns was humanity's troubled (...) relationship with the natural world. It was his belief that empathizing with and defending nature was of vital importance to the human spirit, bringing great depth and meaning to our experience of life itself. -/- Though the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" is seen as a pivotal moment in awakening the environmental movement, Tillich was writing decades before this of the commodification and desecration of the natural world. He witnessed the rise of industrialization and the power of this synthetic world to bend humanity to its demands, and warned that “we are living in the late stage of the self-destruction of industrial society, as a world above the given world of nature." Though creative in many respects, he also saw this technical enterprise impoverishing our spiritual lives and inflicting untold suffering on a defenseless planet and our fellow nonhuman animals. -/- With great implications for environmental ethics, a central part of Tillich’s theology is his “multidimensional unity of life,” a unique scientific and moral perspective that vastly expands our concept of life, granting deep significance to even the inorganic dimension. Perhaps most importantly, Tillich challenges religious views that see life on this planet as subordinate to the "real" lives to come after death, famously stating that “there is no salvation [salvus: to heal and make whole] of man if there is no salvation of nature, for man is in nature and nature is in man." -/- In this timely and original assessment of Tillich, Yunt provides a philosophical bulwark against the modern world's increasing assault on science, reason, and nature. And by examining contemporary environmental movements such as deep ecology and ecopsychology, as well as current issues like climate change and the impact of human diet and new technologies on the planet, Yunt brings clarity to the increasingly obvious fact that humans are within the realm of the natural world, not above it. (shrink)

This paper explores early Australasian philosophy in some detail. Two approaches have dominated Western philosophy in Australia: idealism and materialism. Idealism was prevalent between the 1880s and the 1930s, but dissipated thereafter. Idealism in Australia often reflected Kantian themes, but it also reflected the revival of interest in Hegel through the work of ‘absolute idealists’ such as T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley, and Henry Jones. A number of the early New Zealand philosophers were also educated in the idealist tradition (...) and were influential in their communities, but produced relatively little. In Australia, materialism gained prominence through the work of John Anderson, who arrived in Australia in 1927, and continues to be influential. John Anderson had been a student of Henry Jones, who might therefore be said to have influenced both main strands of Australian philosophical thought. (shrink)

The premise of environmental management pivots on managing the people-environment relationship. Yet this field remains dominated by the idea of managing the environment not the relationship, and as such continues to enact dualistic and reductionist traditions. Deep ecology's relational ontology offers a means of moving beneath and beyond such traditions. Specifically, the theory of internal relations as manifest within Arne Naess's gestalt ontology - if developed with regard to relational work emerging within cultural geography - is an aspect of deep (...) ecology that has relevance and implications for environmental management's theory and practice. Such a stance provides qualified support for Warwick Fox's identification of the significance of Self-realisation within deep ecological philosophy, and counters attempts by some deep ecology proponents to write Fox and his work out of the history and future prospects of deep ecology. (shrink)

Rationalism is the key to the connected oppressions of women and nature in the West. Deep ecology has failed to provide an adequate historical perspective or an adequate challenge to human/nature dualism. A relational account of self enables us to reject an instrumental view of nature and develop an alternative based on respect without denying that nature is distinct from the self. This shift of focus links feminist, environmentalist, and certain forms of socialist critiques. The critique of anthropocentrism is not (...) sacrificed, as deep ecologists argue, but enriched. (shrink)

There is a long-standing claim within feminist literature that women speak with a 'different voice' (Gilligan 1982), that it is both possible and desirable to have an ethics from the standpoint of women (Noddings 1990), that the standpoint of women is a better starting point for adequate knowledge of the world (Harding 1993). This claim is central to ecofeminist politics, that women have a particular perspective on the relationship between humanity and nature and have a moral/political calling to reweave the (...) world (Diamond and Orenstein 1990) or heal the wounds of an ecologically destructive social order (Plant 1989). In this essay I will not be making the claim that women per se have a superior vision or a higher moral authority, but that an ethics that does not take account of the gendered nature of society is doomed to failure as it will confront neither the material structure of human society or the way in which that structure impacts on the materiality of the relationship between humanity and nature. (shrink)

The application of hierarchy theory to ecological systems presents those who seek a radical change in human perspectives toward nature with a unique window of opportunity. Because hierarchy theory has enabled scientific ecologists to discover that the window through which one chooses to observe a system influences its reality, they may now be more amenable to including the perspectives of deep and feminist ecologists into their self-definition. A synergy between deep, feminist, and scientific ecology could improve environmental policy by encouraging (...) more ecofeminists to encompass the marginalisation of nonhuman life-forms within the ethic of care, more deep ecologists to encompass the issues of overconsumption and militarisation within the anthropocentric-biocentric polarity, and more scientific ecologists to scrutinise the politics behind their investigations. (shrink)

Deep ecology and ecofeminism are contemporary environmental philosophies that share the desire to supplant the predominant Western anthropocentric environmental frameworks. Recently thinkers from these movements have focused their critiques on each other, and substantial differences have emerged. This essay explores central aspects of this debate to ascertain whether either philosophy has been undermined in the process and whether there are any indications that they are compatible despite their differences.

Aarne Naess, in a seminal paper on environmental philosophy, distinguished between two streams of environmental philosophy and activism—shallow and deep. The deep, long-range ecology movement has developed over the past four decades on a variety of fronts. However, in the context of global conferences on development, population, and environment held during the 1990s, even shallow environmentalism seems to have less priority than demands for worldwide economic growth based on trade liberalization and a free market global economy.

In this essay I examine the relevance of the vocabulary of an ethics of care to ecofeminism. While this vocabulary appears to offer a promising alternative to moral extensionism and deep ecology, there are problems with the use of this vocabulary by both essentialists and conceptualists. I argue that too great a reliance is placed on personal lived experience as a basis for ecofeminist ethics and that the concept of care is insufficiently determinate to explicate the meaning of care for (...) nature. (shrink)

Philosophy and Literature is an internationally renowned refereed journal founded by Denis Dutton at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch. It is now published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. Since its inception in 1976, Philosophy and Literature has been concerned with the relation between literary and philosophical studies, publishing articles on the philosophical interpretation of literature as well as the literary treatment of philosophy. Philosophy and Literature has sometimes been regarded as iconoclastic, in the sense that it repudiates academic pretensions, (...) insidious jargon and institutional vogue. Dutton, who remains the editor, still writes a regular column. A distinctive feature of Philosophy and Literature was the annual Bad Writing Contest, held from 1995–98, which sought to identify (and publish) the ‘most stylistically lamentable passages’ of academic prose, often to great amusement. (shrink)

This article looks at the idea of spirituality as it is discussed within ecophilosophical circles, particularly ecofeminism, bioregionalism, and deep ecology, as a means to improve human-nature interactions. The article also examines the use each ecophilosophy makes of a popular alternative to main-stream religion, that of Native American spiritualities, and problems inherent in adapting that alternative.

Both Richard Sylvan’s trenchant critique of Deep Ecology and Warwick Fox’s illuminating reinterpretation and defence are presented and appraised. Besides throwing light on the nature and the prospects of the defence of Deep Ecology and of its diverse axiological, epistemological and metaphysical strands, the appraisal discloses the range of normative positions open to those who reject anthropocentrism, of which Deep Ecology is no more than one (and, if Fox’s account of its nature is right, may not be one at all). (...) A position intermediate between Deep Ecology and anthropocentrism is advocated, which has been called by Wayne Sumner "middle-depth environmentalism – a kind of continental shelf between the shallow and deep extremes". (shrink)

: This essay examines the content and significance of the notion of "identification" as it appears in the works of theorists of deep ecology. It starts with the most frequently expressed conception of identification—termed "identification-as-belonging"—and distinguishes several different variants of it. After reviewing two criticisms of deep ecology that appear to target this notion, it is argued that there is a second, less frequently noticed type of identification that appears primarily in the work of Arne Naess—"identification-as-kinship." Following this analysis, it (...) is suggested that identification-as-kinship may be less vulnerable to the criticisms that are aimed at identification-as-belonging. (shrink)

While human beings generally act prosocially towards one another — contra a Hobbesian “war of all against all” — this basic social courtesy tends not to be extended to our relations with the more-than-human world. Educational philosophy is largely grounded in a worldview that privileges human-centered conceptions of the self, valuing its own opinions with little regard for the ecological realities undergirding it. This hyper-separation from the ‘society of all beings’ is a foundational cause of our current ecological crises. In (...) this paper, we develop an ecosocial philosophy of education based on the idea of an ecological self. We aspire to consolidate voices from deep ecology and ecofeminism for conceptualizing education in terms of being responsible to and for, a complex web of interdependent relations among human and more-than-human beings. By analyzing the notion of opinions in light of Gilles Deleuze’s critique of the ‘dogmatic image of thought,’ we formulate three aspects of ESPE capable of supporting an ecological as opposed to an egoistic conception of the self: rather than dealing with fixed concepts, ESPE supports adaptable and flexible boundaries between the self and the world; rather than fixating on correct answers, ESPE focuses on real-life problems shifting our concern from the self to the world; and rather than supporting arrogance, EPSE cultivates an epistemic humility grounded in our ecological embeddedness in the world. These approaches seek to enable an education that cultivates a sense of self that is less caught up with arbitrary, egoistic opinions of the self and more attuned to the ecological realities constituting our collective life-worlds. (shrink)