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.

An examination of the Scientific Revolution that shows how the mechanistic world view of modern science has sanctioned the exploitation of nature, unrestrained commercial expansion, and a new socioeconomic order that subordinates women.

In the Middle Ages there were gaols and dungeons, but punishment was for the most part a spectacle. The economic changes and growing popular dissent of the 18th century made necessary a more systematic control over the individual members of society, and this in effect meant a change from punishment, which chastised the body, to reform, which touched the soul.

The work of Giorgio Agamben, one of Italy's most important and original philosophers, has been based on an uncommon erudition in classical traditions of philosophy and rhetoric, the grammarians of late antiquity, Christian theology, and modern philosophy. Recently, Agamben has begun to direct his thinking to the constitution of the social and to some concrete, ethico-political conclusions concerning the state of society today, and the place of the individual within it. In Homo Sacer, Agamben aims to connect the problem of (...) pure possibility, potentiality, and power with the problem of political and social ethics in a context where the latter has lost its previous religious, metaphysical, and cultural grounding. Taking his cue from Foucault's fragmentary analysis of biopolitics, Agamben probes with great breadth, intensity, and acuteness the covert or implicit presence of an idea of biopolitics in the history of traditional political theory. He argues that from the earliest treatises of political theory, notably in Aristotle's notion of man as a political animal, and throughout the history of Western thinking about sovereignty, a notion of sovereignty as power over "life" is implicit. The reason it remains merely implicit has to do, according to Agamben, with the way the sacred, or the idea of sacrality, becomes indissociable from the idea of sovereignty. Drawing upon Carl Schmitt's idea of the sovereign's status as the exception to the rules he safeguards, and on anthropological research that reveals the close interlinking of the sacred and the taboo, Agamben defines the sacred person as one who can be killed and yet not sacrificed—a paradox he sees as operative in the status of the modern individual living in a system that exerts control over the collective "naked life" of all individuals. (shrink)

In this essay I present an overview of the problem of climate change, with attention to issues of interest to feminists, such as the differential responsibilities of nations and the disproportionate “vulnerabilities” of females, people of color, and the economically disadvantaged in relation to climate change. I agree with others that justice requires governments, corporations, and individuals to take full responsibility for histories of pollution, and for present and future greenhouse gas emissions. Nonetheless I worry that an overemphasis on household (...) and personal-sphere fossil fuel emissions distracts from attention to higher-level corporate and governmental responsibilities for addressing the problem of climate change. I argue that more attention should be placed on the higher-level responsibilities of corporations and governments, and I discuss how individuals might more effectively take responsibility for addressing global climate change, especially when corporations and governments refuse to do so. (shrink)

Biopolitical analyses of census -taking usually focus on human censuses and consider how human experience is shaped by the practice. Instead, this article looks at the proposed global biodiversity census, which aims to take inventory of every species on earth as a response to anthropogenic species extinction. I suggest that it is possible to extend and modify Foucault's concept of biopower to consider contemporary human-nonhuman interactions. Specifically, I argue that an ecologically-extended version of biopower offers a useful way to conceptualise (...) how power circulates in the practices that surround the biodiversity census, and that it points us towards thinking about how analyses of power, authority, and community can consider ecological, rather than purely human, locations and networks. (shrink)

This book shows how political argument in terms of rights and natural rights began in medieval Europe, and how the theory of natural rights was developed in the seventeenth century after a period of neglect in the Renaissance. Dr Tuck provides a new understanding of the importance of Jean Gerson in the formation of the theories, and of Hugo Grotius in their development; he also restores the Englishman John Selden's ideas to the prominence they once enjoyed, and shows how Thomas (...) Hobbes's political theory can best be understood against this background. In general, the book enables us to understand more fully the characteristics of the natural rights theories available to the men of the Enlightenment, and thereby to appreciate the complexity and equivocal nature of modern right theories. (shrink)

The first work to introduce Foucault's ideas on law to both graduates and undergraduates.

"The medical establishment has become a major threat to health. The disabling impact of professional control over medicine has reached the proportions of an epidemic. Iatrogenesis, the name for this new epidemic, comes from iatros, the Greek word for physician, and genesis, meaning origin. Discussion of the disease of medical progress has moved up on the agendas of medical conferences, researchers concentrate on the sick-making powers of diagnosis and therapy, and reports on paradoxical damage caused by cures for sickness take (...) up increasing space in medical dope-sheets [...] The public has been alerted to the perplexity and uncertainty of the best among its hygienic caretakers [...] This book argues that panic is out of place. Thoughtful public discussion of the iatrogenic pandemic, beginning with an insistence upon demystification of all medical matters, will not be dangerous to the commonweal."-- from Introduction. (shrink)

Martha Albertson Fineman's earlier work developed a theory of inevitable and derivative dependencies as a way of problematizing the core assumptions underlying the 'autonomous' subject of liberal law and politics in the context of US equality discourse. Her 'vulnerability thesis' represents the evolution of that earlier work and situates human vulnerability as a critical heuristic for exploring alternative legal and political foundations. This book draws together major British and American scholars who present different perspectives on the concept of vulnerability and (...) Fineman's 'vulnerability thesis'. The contributors include scholars who have thought about vulnerability in different ways and contexts prior to encountering Fineman's work, as well as those for whom Fineman's work provided an introduction to thinking through a vulnerability lens. This collection demonstrates the broad and intellectually exciting potential of vulnerability as a theoretical foundation for legal and political engagements with a range of urgent contemporary challenges. Exploring ways in which vulnerability might provide a new ethical foundation for law and politics, the book will be of interest to the general reader, as well as academics and students in fields such as jurisprudence, philosophy, legal theory, political theory, feminist theory, and ethics. (shrink)

'To think often, and never to retain it so much as one moment, is a very useless sort of thinking' In An Essay concerning Human Understanding, John Locke sets out his theory of knowledge and how we acquire it. Eschewing doctrines of innate principles and ideas, Locke shows how all our ideas, even the most abstract and complex, are grounded in human experience and attained by sensation of external things or reflection upon our own mental activities. A thorough examination of (...) the communication of ideas through language and the conventions of taking words as signs of ideas paves the way for his penetrating critique of the limitations of ideas and the extent of our knowledge of ourselves, the world, God, and morals. Locke's masterpiece laid the foundation of British empiricism and is of enduring interest to anyone exploring the development of philosophical thought. This sensitive abridgement uses P. H. Nidditch's authoritative text, and together with an illuminating introduction and other features, makes Locke's arguments more accessible. (shrink)

This book is a major new introduction to the field of ecological ethics. Taking issue with the common assumption that existing human ethics can be 'extended' to meet the demands of the ongoing ecological crisis, Patrick Curry shows that a new and truly ecological ethic is both possible and urgently needed. With this distinctive proposition in mind, Curry introduces and discusses all the major concepts needed to understand the full range of ecological ethics. Focussing first on the major concepts of (...) ethics - religious and secular - and value, Curry then examines the gradations of ecological ethics. He discusses light green, shallow or anthropomorphic ethics with the examples of stewardship, lifeboat ethics, and social ecology; mid-green or intermediate ethics represented by animal liberation/rights and biocentrism; and dark green, deep, or ecocentric ethics. Particular attention is given to the various kinds of ecocentric ethics, such as the Land Ethic, The Gaia Hypothesis, and Deep Ecology and its offshoots: Deep Green Theory, Left Biocentrism and the Earth Manifesto. Ecofeminism is also considered in this context. The concluding chapters discuss green ethics as post-secular, moral pluralism and pragmatism, green citizenship, and human population in the light of ecological ethics. This comprehensive and wide-ranging textbook offers a radical but critical introduction to the subject. It will be of great interest to students, activists, and to a wider public concerned with the ecocrisis, its main theories, debates, and possible solutions. (shrink)

Viewing Foucault in the light of work by Continental and American philosophers, most notably Nietzsche, Habermas, Deleuze, Richard Rorty, Bernard Williams, and Ian Hacking, Genealogy as Critique shows that philosophical genealogy involves not only the critique of modernity but also its transformation. Colin Koopman engages genealogy as a philosophical tradition and a method for understanding the complex histories of our present social and cultural conditions. He explains how our understanding of Foucault can benefit from productive dialogue with philosophical allies to (...) push Foucaultian genealogy a step further and elaborate a means of addressing our most intractable contemporary problems. (shrink)

Roberto Esposito is one of the most prolific and important exponents of contemporary Italian political theory.

The book "Philosophy of Nature: Rethinking Naturalness" is an effort to develop a philosophically plausible and practically viable concept of naturalness in such a way that this issue can be generally discussed and considered. The goal is to show why naturalness has been abandoned in modern academic discourse, why it is important to explicitly re-establish some kind of meaning for the concept and what that meaning ought to be. In our times, when asking the question, “What does or should restrict (...) the human rearrangement of non-human nature?” we have two main resources to inform our response. The first resource is science, which will give you an answers by pointing to the physical boundaries in non-human nature. Such boundaries are those of 'necessary relations in nature' and are in fact surprisingly few. Although important there are very few boundaries "in itself", and sometimes that is exactly what provokes the public to turn to the second resource, namely religion and/or ethics. For instance: what is wrong with the mice walking around with a human ear on its back? What could be wrong about cutting down the Amazon rainforest? From the perspective of science, nothing. From the perspective of ethics, there may be a plurality of responses pointing to there being something wrong. What this something may be remains however notoriously difficult to agree upon. Between what is instrumentally possible and ethically right and attractive, there seems to be nothing. That is, there is nothing “in nature” that tells us not to do something that is physically or instrumentally possible to do. Religious and/or ethical answers are therefore the only answers we can give whenever we are confronted with questions about the "rearrangement of nature". However, such answers are often thought to be subjective; they tell us something about ourselves, but - again - nothing about nature. It is only science, it is assumed, that can tell us the objective truth about “nature itself”, which brings us back to "the physically possible", or what is called possible-I-nature in the book. Ontology is the area of philosophy concerned with the fundamental ways that things are. As such, it has the potentiality to provide us with a vocabulary with which to address this unsatisfying disjunction between the resources of science and those of morality. By articulating an ontology of naturalness, I offer a way to bridge the gap between instrumental and ethical answers. Arguing that naturalness can be understood in light of a dispositional ontology, I maintain that it is possible for someone to claim that there is a right and a wrong way to manipulate nature. The “ought” that follows from this position is “normative”, but not moral. It is grounded by the scientific assumptions that are built into a proper concept of naturalness, not by an appeal to moral or religious principles. As in: "you ought to lift the stone this way, and not that way". The main ontological question raised in the book is focused around the issue of the so-called "compossibility" of nature. What can we say about how nature is and can be related? The prevailing view on this question is that "things are connected either by necessity or by coincidence (contingency)". This view is called modal dualism. The ontology of dispositions offers a third modality, and it is remarkable what kind of difference this modality can make for the question and understanding of naturalness. This book is not an attempt to reestablish Aristotelianism. That would be contrary to an informed understanding of the historical logic that is underlying this issue, since it is exactly the strong association between naturalness and Aristotelianism that has gridlocked the concept of naturalness into the homeless void where we find it today. The “rebirth” signaled in the book’s title must come from an ontology of naturalness that is in line with the task of doing modern-type science. After endless attempts to bring forward theories and opinions that could heal and amend our relationship with nature from an ethical point of view, it is time to see the issue from an ontological point of view. This book is devoted to the task of making the problem of what we mean by “natural” more transparent in general, but also to the task of working out a particular concept of naturalness that can serve as a guide to understand the real limits of our manipulations in times where our powers to rearrange nature reaches new levels every week. (shrink)

Considering the paradigm of modernity's three key concepts --law, power, and science--Santos argues for extensive epistemological shifts in the field of critical social thought. He traces the historical process by which both modern science and modern law lost the balance between social regulation and social emancipation inscribed originally in the paradigm of modernity. Pleading for a new dialogic rhetoric and moving back and forth between solid empirical work and highly innovative and far reaching theorizing, he deals with diverse topics.

In Part One Leiss traces the idea of the domination of nature from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century.