This dissertation is based around conceptual conflicts introduced by the notion of rewilding and the challenges rewilding poses to place and cultural landscapes. Rewilding is a recent conservation strategy interested in the return of wilder, less human-managed environments. Often presented as an antidote to increasingly homogenized, organized, and managed environments, rewilding deliberately opens up space for the return of wild nature, typically by removing human elements that have obstructed or diminished its free reign or by reintroducing locally extinct species to (...) re-activate trophic cascades. There is, however, an increasing awareness that rewilding in many places will threaten cultural landscapes that are prized for their human meanings and histories. This dissertation does not attempt to resolve this conflict but instead takes a hermeneutic interest in it and tries to understand better what is at stake in such a conflict. This is attempted by means of a hermeneutic detour through the concepts of place and of wilderness, and ultimately the dissertation argues that instead of understanding rewilding simply as undermining notions of place, we should understand rewilding itself as placemaking. This conceptual work is informed by actual cases of rewilding and an examination of the conflicts arising out of the various modes of placemaking rewilding performs. Three modes of placemaking are demonstrated: wilderness placemaking, experimental placemaking, and place-regenerative placemaking. Taken in total, these reveal ways in which rewilding confronts us with relations with nonhuman others and with questions of belonging and not belonging that are increasingly at issue. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Linda Zagzebski’s exemplarist moral theory has gained traction in recent years as a valid approach to moral education. Insufficient attention has so far been paid to questions about who we should count among exemplary people to be emulated. In this paper, we make the case for considering the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg as one moral exemplar for the contemporary world. Since Thunberg is a controversial figure, we not only argue in positive terms why Thunberg would make a good (...) exemplar, but also respond to a number of objections that could be made to her exemplarity based on popular discussions. Our argument is however not limited to showing why Thunberg should be considered a moral exemplar. Through our discussion, we also exemplify the kind of critical discussions that in our view should be part of how exemplarism is utilized as a theory of moral education. (shrink)

An extension of Alasdair MacIntyre's concept of ‘virtues of acknowledged dependence', to include relationships with the non-human world, offers an organising principle for environmental virtue ethics. It situates ecological virtue among more traditional virtues of inter-human relationships, and may thereby contribute to an ethical reconciliation of policies aimed at encouraging ecological virtue with those aimed at protecting the freedoms required for personal autonomy. Within this eudaimonist framework, ecological virtue may be understood and promoted as directly contributing to a good life.

Philosophy, by and large, tends to dwell on what might be called the woeful nature of reality—finitude, suffering, loss, death, and the like. While these topics are no doubt worthy of philosophical concern, undue focus on them tends to obscure other facets of our experience and of reality, giving philosophy a temperament that could justifiably be called melancholic. Without besmirching the value of such inquiry, this paper suggests that philosophers have largely ignored the experience of joy and, consequently, missed its (...) distinctive contributions to our understanding of the meaningfulness of life and the goodness of being. Traditional accounts of the problem of evil are rooted in what John D. Caputo calls “strong theology,” which tends to construe evil as a problem to which God should supply the answer or solution. However, if we call into question traditional accounts of omnipotence, evil ceases to be a problem, and we become free to engage it as part of what Gabriel Marcel calls “the mystery of being.” Thus liberated, we are free to assess more clearly phenomena missed by melancholic accounts of being, among them the experience of joy, attested to in diverse forms of philosophy, literature, memoir, and elsewhere. (shrink)