Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's approach to natural scientific research has unmistakable parallels to phenomenology. These parallels are clear enough to allow one to say confidently that Goethe's delicate empiricism is indeed a phenomenology of nature. This paper examines how Goethe's criticisms of Newton anticipated Husserl's announcement of the crisis of the modern sciences, and it describes how Goethe, at a critical juncture in cultural history, addressed this emerging crisis through a scientific method that is virtually identical to the method of (...) contemporary empirical-phenomenological research in the human sciences. Goethe's practice of science shares with phenomenology a participatory, morally-responsive, and holistic approach to the description of dynamic life-world phenomena. Delicate empiricism has its own version of the phenomenological epoché, and, like Husserl's technique of imaginative variation, it strives to disclose the essential or archetypal structure of the phenomenon through the endowment of human imagination. However, a close reading of Goethe suggests that the tendency amongst some scholars to distinguish phenomenology as human science from the natural sciences is actually a costly error which unwittingly falls prey to implicit Cartesian assumptions. Goethe, however, manages to avoid these problems by performing from the first a phenomenology of nature's sensibility. (shrink)

Despite the vast amount of work produced by philosophers, historians and sociologists on the nature of scientific activity, “observation itself is rarely the focus of attention and almost never the subject of historical inquiry in its own right”. This general lack of interest in the nature of scientific observation was perhaps most clearly reflected in the Vienna Circle’s attempt to establish an analysis of science beginning at the level of protocol sentences. To do so, of course, they had to disregard (...) the humidity and fogged lenses facing the primatologist in the jungle, or the way in which flights aboard military aircraft were once sought by physicists in order to expose... (shrink)

The essay proposes to re-orient feminist debates on epistemology towards the care-security nexus as a pathway that can plausibly provide an integral understanding of a human-centred and eco-minded security. Seeing "gender" in binary terms tends to produce an understanding of "care" as "female" and "security" as "male". Care, when free from the constraints of gender as a binary construct, can play an important role in revealing the depth of ethical-political concerns and help expand the understanding of security. By revisiting the (...) concept of care present in the two feminist innovations -- situated knowledge and knowledge production as quilting -- the essay shows that there are gains to be made in bridging existing rifts between feminist knowledge networks and beyond. The concept of situated knowledge gives significance to care as self-reflexivity -- an ongoing process and a multifaceted nature of experience in the relation between the knower and the known. Knowledge production as quilting displaces the image of the solitary knowledge agent and provides a flexible approach to epistemology less constrained by teleological assumptions, appealing instead to interdisciplinary and inter-cultural cooperation. Both aspects of feminist epistemology are conducive to address the care-security nexus as an open and dynamic phenomenon, for which a successful inclusion of distinctive insights from different disciplines and cultural frameworks of knowledge would be a gain. (shrink)

This paper studies cultural representations which critically address the high level of environmental degradation ushered in by successive regimes of China's modernization. On the one hand, it will review a group of blog cartoons reacting to a recent environmental hazard, the Huangpu River floating pigs incident, which were published beginning from mid-March 2013. On the other hand, it looks at intellectual responses to a political economy of short-term profit extraction whose negative impact far exceeds the destruction of the nation's landscapes. (...) Selective readings of lower rungs fiction, landscape poetry and multi-media art, and theoretical essays on questions of landscape aesthetics will discuss how these authors express their worries about the consequences of a narrowly functional approach towards natural resources. According to them, the foreclosing of traditional aesthetic principles that used to support sustainability in modern modes of governance has yielded an unprecedented moral decline of the community as well as an alarming depletion of the nation's non-human recreational powers. In conclusion, five kinds of environmental subjects will tentatively be identified together with their different patterns of agency. (shrink)

There is a familiar opposition between a ‘Scientific Revolution’ ethos and practice of experimentation, including experimentation on life, and a ‘vitalist’ reaction to this outlook. The former is often allied with different forms of mechanism – if all of Nature obeys mechanical laws, including living bodies, ‘iatromechanism’ should encounter no obstructions in investigating the particularities of animal-machines – or with more chimiatric theories of life and matter, as in the ‘Oxford Physiologists’. The latter reaction also comes in different, perhaps irreducibly (...) heterogeneous forms, ranging from metaphysical and ethical objections to the destruction of life, as in Margaret Cavendish, to more epistemological objections against the usage of instruments, the ‘anatomical’ outlook and experimentation, e.g. in Locke and Sydenham. But I will mainly focus on a third anti-interventionist argument, which I call ‘vitalist’ since it is often articulated in the writings of the so-called Montpellier Vitalists, including their medical articles for the Encyclopédie. The vitalist argument against experimentation on life is subtly different from the metaphysical, ethical and epistemological arguments, although at times it may borrow from any of them. It expresses a Hippocratic sensibility – understood as an artifact of early modernity, not as some atemporal trait of medical thought – in which Life resists the experimenter, or conversely, for the experimenter to grasp something about Life, it will have to be without torturing or radically intervening in it. I suggest that this view does not have to imply that Nature is something mysterious or sacred; nor does the vitalist have to attack experimentation on life in the name of some ‘vital force’ – which makes it less surprising to find a vivisectionist like Claude Bernard sounding so close to the vitalists. (shrink)

This article examines Adam Smith’s views on animals, centering on the singularity of his economic perspective in the context of the general early ethical debate about animals. Particular emphasis is placed on his discussions of animals as property. The article highlights the tension between Smith’s moral sensitivity to animal suffering on the one hand, and his emphasis on the constitutive role that the utilization of animals played in the progress of civilization on the other. This tension is depicted as a (...) precursor of problematic aspects of the modern environmental crisis. (shrink)

Ideas about soul and body – about thinking or remembering, mind and life, brain and self – remain both diverse and controversial in our neurocentric age. The history of these ideas is significant both in its own right and to aid our understanding of the complex sources and nature of our concepts of mind, cognition, and psychology, which are all terms with puzzling, difficult histories. These topics are not the domain of specialists alone, and studies of emotion, perception, or reasoning (...) have never been isolated theoretical endeavours. As Francis Bacon described human philosophy or ‘the knowledge of ourselves’, within which he located the study of body, soul, and mind, it ‘deserveth the more accurate handling, by how much it toucheth us more nearly’ (1605/ 2000: 93). The history of ideas in these domains is particularly challenging given the practical dimensions and implications of theories of mind. Because theories of human nature and debates about body and mind do ‘touch us’ so ‘nearly’, they attract and can thus reveal, in specific historical contexts, interconnected discourses or associations which may be quite unlike our own. So there are no neat boundaries around a historical category of ‘seventeenth-century British philosophy of the soul’. The central topic of this chapter can be thought of either as pneumatology, the doctrine or science of spirits and souls, or as continuous with the ‘psychologia’ or psychology of Aristotelian traditions (Park and Kessler 1988; Hatfield 1995: 184-6). In neither case, however, should we expect any deep unity to be provided by history, geography, discipline, or subject-matter. (shrink)

This paper argues that, by construing emotion as epistemologically subversive, the Western tradition has tended to obscure the vital role of emotion in the construction of knowledge. The paper begins with an account of emotion that stresses its active, voluntary, and socially constructed aspects, and indicates how emotion is involved in evaluation and observation. It then moves on to show how the myth of dispassionate investigation has functioned historically to undermine the epistemic authority of women as well as other social (...) groups associated culturally with emotion. Finally, the paper sketches some ways in which the emotions of underclass groups, especially women, may contribute to the development of a critical social theory. (shrink)

The article provides a compact review of the early modern science views of the nature of science, scientific method and knowledge, rationality and objectivity with respect to masculinity and femininity. Following primarily Galileo and Bacon's work, the author is interested in pointing out the most important ideas of the historically fixed ways of how people imagined the acquisition of knowledge, presented nature, understood the role of researchers, as well as what metaphors they applied in defining knowledge. Due to the vast (...) and diverse material, the aim is not to sketch a complete and detailed portrait of the ideal of modern science, but to explore to what extent gender-related issues were of any significance here. (shrink)

This article examines the role played by ‘feeling’ (Gefühl) and ‘love’ within the philosophy of German Romanticism. After an introduction (I) to the actual debate on German Romanticism, paragraph II sketches an analysis of the concept of Gefühl at the end of the eighteenth century and highlights the differences with its actual meaning. The successive three sections are dedicated to three pivotal figures of German Romanticism: F. Schlegel (III), Novalis (IV), and Baader (V). Similarities and differences between these authors will (...) be emphasized. It will be demonstrated that they deny the reason˗feeling opposition, and that ‘feeling’ and ‘love’ are at the heart of their ontology, epistemology, and conception of subjectivity, conditioning the Romantic human-nature relationship and Romantic political philosophy. In the concluding remarks (VI), this paper explains how German Romanticism can still help to better understand the role of feelings in politics. (shrink)

Recent years have witnessed an increase in bear sightings in Latvia, causing a change of tone in the country’s media outlets, regarding the return of “wild” animals. The unease around bear reappearance leads me to investigate the affective side of relations with beings that show strength and resilience in more-than-human encounters in human-inhabited spaces. These relations are characterized by the contrasting human feelings of alienation vis-à-vis their environments today and a false sense of security, resulting in disbelief to encounter beings (...) capable of challenging human exceptionalism. In a broader sense, the unease connects to human self-constitution and the fragility of the self, fueled by the domination of substance ontologies. This article considers bears as beings “in exile,” as potential threats to human self-pronounced exceptionality, and thus, examples of experienced abject regarding human subjectivity. The article aims to analyze the way the constitution of human selfhood is tied to the alienation of wildlife and its genealogical and biopolitical context and to question if a reconceptualization of the human/nonhuman relations via process, instead of substance ontology, is needed. (shrink)

When we deal with complex things, like human subjects or organizations, we deal with identity – that which makes a person or an organization what it is and distinguishes him/her/it from other persons or organizations, a kind of “self”. Our identity determines how we think about and interact with others. It will be argued in this chapter that the self is constituted relationally. Moreover, when we are in the realm of the self, we are always already in the realm of (...) engaging with and mediating differences – the realm of ethics. The position which will be developed argues that approaching identity as a complex system allows us to resist thinking of identity as an easily identifiable and static entity. Identity is always being constituted within a complex and contingent world, where we have to make choices based on contingent values rather than on universal knowledge or the outcome of rational calculations. As a result, we have to keep in mind that our daily practices always already have an ethical component, and our decisions need to be continually evaluated and re-evaluated in the light of our (and others’) varying identities. (shrink)

This article explores the negative framing of environmental concern in the context of food procurement and consumption, through the lens of the myth of Eden considering the ontological and genealogical aspects of the experienced exile from nature. The article first considers the theoretical context of the negative framing of food ethics. Demonstrating the consequences of the experience of food as abject, the article then goes on to discuss the exile from Eden as an explanatory myth for the perceptual inbetweenness of (...) humankind. The aim of the article is to outline the genealogical markers of the negative framing of food ethics via the discussion of the exile from Eden. In the context of a new materialist understanding of the nature–culture continuum, the article depicts the exile as a perceptual rather than ontological divide that does not reflect a factual human inbetweenness but mirrors the objectification of nature by stripping the flesh of its spirit. Such reenvisioning is thought to be a pivotal aspect for mitigating the affectual abjectivity of food and recapturing the factual entanglement of body–environment to enable affirmative environmental ethics. (shrink)

Enactive cognitive science combines questions in epistemology, ontology, and ethics by conceiving of bodies as open-ended and mutually transforming through activity. While enaction is not a theory of ethics, it can contribute to its foundations. We present a schematization of enactive ideas that underlie traditional distinctions between Being, Knowing, and Doing. Ethics in this scheme begins in the relation between knowing and becoming. Critical of dichotomous thinking, we approach the questions of alterity and ethical reality. Alterity is relevant to the (...) enactive approach, but not in the radical sense of transcendental arguments. We propose difference, instead, as a more generative concept. Following Simondon, we see norms and values manifest in webs of past and future acts together with their potentialities for becoming. We propose a transindividual concept of moral attunement that includes ethical know-how and consciousness raising. Through generative difference and attunement to configurations of becoming, enaction underpins an ethics of participation linking virtue ethics and ethics of care. (shrink)

Echoing other articles in this special issue, this article re-evaluates a collection of feminist works that fell out of fashion as a consequence of academic feminism embracing poststructuralist and postmodernist trends. In line with fellow contributors, the article critically reflects upon the unsympathetic reading of feminisms considered to be essentialising and universalistic, in order to re-evaluate, in my case, ecofeminism. As an introduction, I reflect on my own perhaps unfair rejection of ecofeminism as a doctoral researcher and early career academic (...) who, in critiquing 1990s international environmental governance, sought to problematise the essentialist premise on which it appeared to be based. The article thereafter challenges this well-rehearsed critique by carefully revisiting a sample of ecofeminist work produced between the late 1970s and the early 1990s. In an effort to avoid wholesale abandonment of the wealth of feminist theory often labelled as second wave, or the rendering of feminisms of the past as redundant as feminist theory changes over time, this article re-reads the work of ecofeminists, such as Starhawk, Susan Griffin and Vandana Shiva, to demonstrate their contemporary relevance. In so doing, the article argues that a contemporary re-reading of ecofeminism offers insights allowing for a radical rethinking of contemporary environmental governance. (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)

This article is a preliminary attempt to map EU research policy from a feminist perspective hitherto absent. The framing and management of national and international research policy have reflected the priorities of an entrenched masculinist scientific elite. Despite the critical role of quantified data in policy analysis and formation, international research labour force statistics remain ungendered. Feminist approaches have been integral to the third wave of epistemological criticism of science this century, claiming that systematic knowledge of the natural, as well (...) as the social world, is socially shaped and thus could be reshaped in ways friendlier to the diversity of women. Such criticism has generated opposition on the part of the scientific elite. The state funding of research is shrinking, while industrial research expands. Women's place within this restructuring research labour market may even be deteriorating, yet feminism still addresses its demands to a retreating science/state relation. Sustained pressure from women's studies researchers and women natural scientists and engineers for a fairer share of the research pie has, in the light of the Amsterdam Treaty, led to Europe introducing gender into research policy. The policy dimension of 'Quality of Life' to enhance 'trust', offers possibilities for feminist intervention. Changing the gender and ethnic composition of the research labour force so that it more adequately reflects the diversity of Europeans enhances Quality of Life. Trust requires that we build on the diverse experiences of European countries in strengthening democratic participation in socially shaping science and technology. (shrink)

In this article, the impact of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions on the sociology of science is evaluated. The main argument is that a questionable construction of Kuhn’s work heralded the constructivist revolution that ultimately contributed to the division between sociology of science and sociology of scientific knowledge. A reorientation of sociology of science that combines institutional and constructivist perspectives is advocated.

It was customary in traditional approaches to the sociology of knowledge to bracket either questions about the possibility of the social determination of natural scientific ideas or questions about the ability of the sociology of knowledge to evaluate other types of knowledge claims. The current strong program in the sociology of knowledge, a typical representative of the new approach to the sociology of science, wants to study the production of natural scientific knowledge scientifically and simultaneously bracket normative considerations. We criticize (...) this neglect of the normative dimension in the strong program on the basis of the role that Marx envisioned for his sociology of knowledge. For example, the sociology of knowledge should be understood as a critique of power that does not merely accept the status quo as a datum. In addition, we attempt to extend Marx's discussion of the social bases of such a critique. (shrink)

This article seeks to open up a new avenue for feminist technology studies—gender-aware research on engineers and engineering practice—on the grounds that engineers are powerful symbols of the equation between masculinity and technology and occupy significant roles in shaping new technologies. Drawing on the disparate evidence available, the author explores four themes. The first asks why the equation between masculinity and technology is so durable when there are such huge mismatches between image and practice. The second examines this mismatch in (...) the detail of engineering knowledge and practice to reveal that fractured and contradictory constructions of masculinity frequently coexist. The third theme addresses the suggestion that women and men might bring different styles to engineering. Finally, the author explores subjective experiences of engineering to argue that engineers’ shared pleasures in and identification with technology both define what it means to be an engineer and provide appealing symbols of power that act to compensate for a perceived lack of power or competence in other arenas. (shrink)

Deep ecology's biocentric philosophy rejects the anthropocentrism of mainstream environmentalism. Biocentrism holds that all life has inherent value and, as such, is worthy of respect and protection. Deep ecology's action strategy emerges from disgust with the compromises made by mainstream environmentalism. Deep ecologists tend toward confrontational actions such as blockades, “tree sits,” and “ecotage” (“monkey wrenching” or covert direct action). Earth First! in the United States, and Rainforest Action Network at the international level, are two well-known deep ecology groups. Bound (...) together in a complex relationship, deep ecology is both dependent on and antagonistic toward the life sciences. As yet, there is no explicit, deep ecological statement for scientific reform. But there have been scientific developments cheering to deep ecologists, including the development and growth of the new field of conservation biology. This article begins to outline the reforms necessary to bring establishment science closer to radical ecological principles. (shrink)

The much-lamented anthropocentrism of human rights is misleading. Human rights anthropocentrism is radically attenuated and reflects persistent patterns of intra- and interspecies injustice and binary subject–object relations inapt for twenty-first-century crises and posthuman complexities. This article explores the possibility of reimagining the “human” of human rights in the light of anti- and post-Cartesian analyses drawing—in particular—upon Merleau-Ponty and on new materialism. This article also seeks to reimagine human rights themselves as responsibilized, injustice-sensitive claim concepts emerging in the “midst of” lively (...) materialities and the uneven global dynamics of twenty-first-century predicaments. (shrink)

Sensory and tracking technologies are being introduced into workplaces in ways Taylor and the Gilbreths could only have imagined. New work design experiments merge wellness with productivity to measure and modulate the affective and emotional labour of resilience that is necessary to survive the turbulence of the widespread incorporation of agile management systems, in which workers are expected to take symbolic direction from machines. The Quantified Workplace project was carried out by one company that fitted sensory algorithmic devices to workers’ (...) computers and bodies, which, this article argues, identify workers’ so-called agility and reveal management practices that track affective and emotional labour, categorized in the project as stress, subjective productivity and wellbeing. Capital’s accelerated attempts to capture more areas of work and workers’ capacities facilitate the conversion of labour power into a source of value but also results in alienation and abstraction. Participants’ resistance to participation in the Quantified Workplace reveals tensions in the labour process when affect is measured in processes of corporate change. (shrink)

This article engages with the question of land in South Africa based on the jubilee notion, from a decolonial theological perspective. It shifts the focus from debating the merits of ‘expropriation of land without compensation’ towards assessing the relations of power that determine and legitimate what constitutes the human relationship to the land. It argues that disruption in eco-relationality wrought by colonial-apartheid is a foundational factor of the land struggles in post-apartheid South Africa. In order to promote land justice, there (...) is a need to liberate the land from apartheid through reclaiming African and Christian notions of land as belonging to God. (shrink)

This introduction to the Queer Death Studies special issue explores an emerging transdisciplinary field of research. This field critically, reflexively and affirmatively investigates and challenges conventional normativities, assumptions, expectations, and regimes of truths that are brought to life and made evident by current planetary scale necropolitics and its framing of death, dying and mourning in the contemporary world. It is set against the background of traditional engagements with the question of death, often grounded in Western hegemonic and normative ideas of (...) dying, dead and mourning subjects and bodies, on the one hand; and on the other contemporary discourses on human and nonhuman death and extinction, directly linked to the environmental crisis, capitalist and post/colonial extractivist necropolitics, material and symbolic violence, oppression and inequalities, and socio-economic, political and ecological unsustainabilities. By bringing together conceptual and analytical tools grounded in feminist materialisms and feminist theorising broadly speaking, queer theory and decolonial critique, the contributions in this special issue strive to advance queerfeminist methodologies and ontological, ethical and political understandings that critically and creatively attend to the problem of death, dying and mourning in the current environmental, cultural, and socio-political contexts. (shrink)

Political respect for nature is an important part of cultivating a more emancipatory and ecologically sustainable politics. As a political principle, it can supplement respect for persons with institutional mechanisms that formally constrain how human power may be exercised over non-human beings and things and that require us to use our power in ways that are attentive to nature’s well-being along with our own. Moreover, when internalized by citizens as part of their shared political ethos and public culture, respect for (...) nature has the potential to protect against the abuse of power in our interpersonal relations with Earth’s non-human parts. Political respect for nature means acknowledging that non-human beings and things count, that they deserve to be treated according to standards of right and that there are principled limits to how human power may be exercised over them. It means formalizing these constraints in the basic structure of society and fostering a public culture of self-restraint and responsiveness. (shrink)

We often think of normal childhood as a progressive development towards a fixed—and often tacitly individualistic and masculine—model of what it is to be an adult. By contrast, phenomenologists, psychoanalysts, sociology of childhood, and feminist thinkers have set out to offer richer accounts both of childhood development and of mature existence. This paper draws on accounts of childhood development from phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty and object relations theorist D. W. Winnicott in order to argue that childhood development takes place in “transitional (...) spaces”; explores typical gendered patterns in the formation of selfhood that “split” relationality and separateness into the “feminine” and the “masculine”; and offers a phenomenology of perception, love, and objectivity in order to show the manner in which, contra individualistic and masculine visions of adulthood, maturity requires an embrace rather than eschewal of ambiguity, and the capacity to continue to dwell in the transitional space between relatedness and separateness. (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)

Indigenous Sustainable Wisdom: First Nation Know-How for Global Flourishing’s contributors describe ways of being that reflect a worldview that has guided humanity for 99% of human history; they describe the practical traditional wisdom stemming from Nature-based relational cultures that were or are guided by this worldview. Such cultures did not cause the kinds of anti-Nature and de-humanizing or inequitable policies and practices that now pervade our world. Far from romanticizing Indigenous histories, Indigenous Sustainable Wisdom offers facts about how human beings, (...) with our potential for good and evil behaviors, can live in relative harmony again. Contributions cover views from anthropology, psychology, sociology, leadership, native science, native history, native art. (shrink)

The objective of this article is to study the relationship between men, women and nature in Sarah Orne Jewett’s ‘A White Heron’ by using ecofeminist perspectives. The cultural and moral vision of J...

Sikap kritis terhadap krisis ekologi yang berdampak buruk pada perempuan telah dimulai oleh Francoise d’Eaubonne dalam bukunya La Feminsme au la Mort (1974). Inilah awal terminologi ekofeminisme diperkenalkan. d’Eaubonne mengungkapkan adanya keterkaitan yang erat antara penindasan terhadap perempuan dan penindasan terhadap alam yang berakar pada kultur patriarki. Dalam sistem ini, perempuan menempati konstruksi posisi yang sama dengan alam yaitu sebagai objek, bukan subjek. Ekofeminisme kemudian lahir untuk memecahkan masalah kehidupan manusia dengan alam yang berangkat dari pengalaman perempuan dan menjadikannya sebagai (...) salah satu sumber belajar dalam pengelolaan dan pelestarian alam. Dalam artikel ini, saya akan mencoba melakukan kritik terhadap beberapa gagasan ekofeminisme. Kritik dalam gagasan ekofeminisme yang akan dilayangkan adalah terkait: relasi antara perempuan dan alam, sifat ideal perempuan, etika kepedulian, gagasan “Ibu Bumi”, dan gagasan menyembuhkan Bumi. Dengan metode studi pustaka, saya akan membedah gagasan dan solusi yang ditawarkan oleh ekofeminisme dalam menghadapi alam saat ini dan melihat apakah ekofeminisme masih relevan dalam epos Antroposen. (shrink)

This conversation between two scholars of international law focuses on the contemporary realities of feminist analysis of international law and on current and future spaces of resistance. It notes that feminism has moved from the margin towards the centre, but that this has also come at a cost. As the language of women’s rights and gender equality has travelled into the international policy worlds of crisis management and peace and security, feminist scholars need to become more careful in their analysis (...) and find new ways of resistance. While noting that we live in dangerous times, this is also a hopeful discussion. (shrink)

It is fashionable to argue that nature and society are obsolete categories. The two, we are told, can no longer be distinguished from one another; continuing loyalty to the ‘binary’ of the natural and the social blinds us to the logic of current ecological crises. This article outlines an argument for the opposite position: now more than ever – particularly in our rapidly warming world – we need to sift out the social components from the natural, if we wish to (...) understand the crises and retain the possibility of intervening in them. Tracing the current of hybridism to the writings of Bruno Latour, this article ends with a critique of the foremost proponent of a hybridism in Marxist garb: Jason W. Moore. Against his theories, it suggests that historical materialism is a form of property dualism that distinguishes between social and natural relations while considering them equally material in substance. That is also the analytical premise of ecological class hatred, the flames of which ecological Marxism seeks to fan. (shrink)

A claim to “healthy ecosystems” comes from the inclusion of the systems thinking required to make judgments on the desirability of an ecological character. It is also explicit about the health of components of the ecosystem, and whether organizations are adaptive and responsive to ecosystem changes. In short, an ecosystem can be “unhealthy”; health is a powerful metaphor for the condition of an ecosystem, and ecosystem approaches to human health make critical contributions to public health.

Remedios’s and Dusek’s response to Lynch’s review is that Lynch misreads Fuller on knowledge and misdirects his criticism of Fuller’s turn to agency.

Food sovereignty asserts the right of peoples to define and organize their own agricultural and food systems so as to meet local needs and so as to secure access to land, water and seed. A commitment to gender equity has been embedded in the food sovereignty concept from its earliest articulations. Some might wonder why gender justice should figure so prominently in a food movement. In this paper I review and augment the arguments for making gender equity a central component (...) of food sovereignty. The most common argument is: if women constitute the majority of the world’s food producers, then agricultural policy is a women’s issue. And insofar as patriarchal social relations continue to dominate the globe, then changing agricultural policies will require explicit attention to gender injustice. I suggest that this is a good argument, but that an ecological feminist perspective can provide additional theoretical reasons for maintaining the centrality of gender justice in food sovereignty discourse. Moreover, ecological feminism can provide a robust theoretical framework that coheres a concept and movement with a wide set of concerns. My critique positions food sovereignty’s call to social justice as embedded in a truly radical re-thinking of dominant conceptual frameworks, and re-envisioning of political and ethical relations. (shrink)

ABSTRACTRoy Bhaskar's concrete utopianism assumes that a key role for intellectuals, given the current precarious situation of humanity, is the envisaging of alternative possible futures, coherently grounded in the deep structure of what already exists, which includes what people already know and have. Without this grounding, people will not be able to make a persuasive case for change. With this grounding, and by combining the realism of the intellect with the optimism of the will, they may be able to usher (...) in a future of which the youthful Marx said ‘the world has long since dreamed’. This paper is both motivated by Bhaskar's position, and takes it as its starting point. I therefore begin by presenting three scenarios for the world's future, which I take to be real possibilities. I consider which of these possibilities would be worth striving for, and in so doing, I introduce a strategy that I take to be a means to that end. Specifically, this strategy involves harmonizing interventions with critical realist eco-philosophical ambitions. I argue that such interventions should therefore have an interdisciplinary framework, be dedicated to an ethics of dialogue and care, and be directed by dialectical change and learning. (shrink)

Remedios and Dusek have provided a useful contextualization of Steve Fuller’s recent work in social epistemology. While they have provided some good criticisms of some of Fuller’s new ideas, they fail to provide a systematic critique of Fuller’s retreat from a naturalistic and materialist social epistemology for one embracing transhumanism, intelligent design, and the proactionary imperative. An alternative approach is developed, drawing on Fuller’s early work and incorporating recent work on our biological and cultural evolution as a species.

This paper adopts the lens of environmental ethics to explore whether there is a disparity between the ethical approaches of a company in comparison to those expressed by stakeholders in relation to environmental issues, specifically those communicated through the corporate environmental report. Discourse analysis is adopted to explore the environmental section of the sustainability reports of the case study company as compared to the responses of a sample of the company’s stakeholders, using the lens of three branches of environmental ethics: (...) utilitarianism, deontology and virtue ethics. Results indicate that the ethical approaches expressed in the case study company’s environmental reports were grounded in utilitarianism and deontology, in contrast to a virtue ethics approach expressed by external stakeholders. The disparity widened as the relationship between the company and the stakeholder became less direct. This disparity signals a failure to meet one of the primary purposes for preparing sustainability reports: to engage with stakeholders. As such this research contributes to the literature by identifying a disparity in the how this information is communicated compared with how it is perceived by stakeholders. This has important implications for the success of current stakeholder engagement practices. (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)

ABSTRACTThe question of the relation between humans and nature lies at the foundation of any philosophy. With the daily worsening environmental crisis, we are forced to face this ancient question again. Yet when we put it into the form of ‘humans and nature’, a metaphysics is already implied and the problem of nature has not yet been questioned. At this moment, the very question that needs to be put forward is, ‘What is nature’? The question of nature will be interrogated (...) through a comparative view in this essay. First, I argue the modern understanding of nature lies at the root of today’s environmental problems. Then, I go back to early Daoism to explore Daoist thinking on ziran. The meaning of ‘dao emulates ziran’ is brought to light through a detailed interpretation of the ziran of dao and things. Ziran penetrates the dao, the heavenly, the earthly and the human. It is with the understanding of ziran that the nature of humans and all things are illuminated. Heidegger’s... (shrink)

The present reflection draws upon a tradition of energetic, world-facing critical legal scholarship to interrogate the anthropos assumed by the terminology of ‘anthropocentrism’ and of the ‘Anthropocene’. The article concludes that any ethically responsible future engagement with ‘anthropocentrism’ and/or with the ‘Anthropocene’ must explicitly engage with the oppressive hierarchical structure of the anthropos itself—and should directly address its apotheosis in the corporate juridical subject that dominates the entire globalised order of the Anthropocene age.

The function of metaphor in science has been labeled as decorative, persuasive, heuristic, instrumental, facilitating or obstructing. It has sometimes been regarded as inspiring, provoking, perverting or destroying rational thought. Metaphor’s positive role has been noted by philosophers, historians of chemistry, and science education researchers. It has been hailed as a descriptive and explanatory device that stimulates and shapes concept development. I discuss how metaphor functions in science generally, then refine this idea through an examination metaphor’s role in chemical thinking (...) in three contexts: the history and philosophy of chemistry, laboratory research practice, and chemical education. I aim to show how metaphor is already operative in the chemist’s use of the concept of chemical element and that this understanding characterizes chemical thinking in general. The chapter concludes with a discussion of a specifically chemical understanding of metaphor. (shrink)

This second companion volume on engineering studies considers engineering practice including contextual analyses of engineering identity, epistemologies and values. Key overlapping questions examine such issues as an engineering identity, engineering self-understandings enacted in the professional world, distinctive characters of engineering knowledge and how engineering science and engineering design interact in practice. -/- Authors bring with them perspectives from their institutional homes in Europe, North America, Australia\ and Asia. The volume includes 24 contributions by more than 30 authors from engineering, the (...) social sciences and the humanities. Additional issues the chapters scrutinize include prominent norms of engineering, how they interact with the values of efficiency or environmental sustainability. A concluding set of articles considers the meaning of context more generally by asking if engineers create their own contexts or are they created by contexts. -/- Taken as a whole, this collection of original scholarly work is unique in its broad, multidisciplinary consideration of the changing character of engineering practice. (shrink)

Luce Irigaray's concept of the "sensible transcendental" is a term that paradoxically fuses mind with body while, at the same time, maintaining the tension of adjacent but separate concepts, thereby providing a fruitful locus for changes to the symbolic order. It provides this locus by challenging the monolithic philosophical discourses of the "Same" which, according to Irigaray, have dominated western civilization since Plato. As such, the sensible transcendental refuses the logic that demands the opposed hierarchal dichotomies between time and space, (...) form and matter, mind and body, self and other, and man and woman, which currently organize western civilization's discursive foundations. Instead, it provides a useful means for helping women to feel at home in their bodies, and it signifies the implementation of an ethical praxis based on the acknowledgment of sexual difference. Such a praxis demands philosophical, theological, juridical, and scientific accountability for systemic sexism and, in its acknowledgment and validation of the alterity of sexual difference, it respects life in its various forms and its vital relationship with biological and physical environments. (shrink)

In this commentary, the microscopic animals of the genus Rotifera, or “rotifers,” emerge as a theory-provoking nonhuman animal. Rotifers embody otherness in ways that may intrigue scholars within both Human-Animal Studies and feminist science studies. In their encounter with rotifers, such fields of research might also engage each other in new, unexpected, and fruitful ways, as is here argued.

The main aim of this paper is to reconstruct different aspects of the history of ideas of suicide, from antiquity to late modernity, and contemplate their dialectical tension. Reflexive suicide prevention, drawing on the ancient wisdom that the art of living is inseparable from the art of dying, takes advantage, it is argued, of the contradictory nature of suicide, and hence embraces, rather than trying to overcome, death, pain, grief, fear, hopelessness and milder depressions. This approach might facilitate the transformation (...) of inner shame to inter-personal guilt, which is the precondition for coping with losses through grieving that is shared with others. The traditional projection of suicide on the ‘Other’, reinforced by modernity’s bio-political suppression of death, has inhibited development of good suicide prevention. Awareness of the ambiguity and ambivalence found in suicide may work as a resource when measures are taken to address as many causal mechanisms as possible, and bringing special emphasis to external factors. (shrink)