Argues that the environmental crisis is symptomatic of much deeper crises in modern civilization.

A bold and original work in ecocosmology and metaphysics.

In claiming that 'nature speaks', authors such as Scott Friskics and David Abram implicitly agree that language use is linked to moral considerability, adding only that we need to extend our conception of language to see that non-humans too use it. I argue that the ethical significance of language use derives from its role in dialogue, in which speakers make truth-claims, question and potentially criticise the claims of others, and provide justifications for the claims they raise themselves. Non-human entities (as (...) a contingent matter) seem not to engage in dialogue in this sense, and none of the examples Friskics and Abram offer suggest that they do. Thus the conception of language such authors employ is too weak to support the ethical conclusions they implicitly wish to defend. (shrink)

What is nature, and how are we to live with it rather than against it, as ecophilosophers enjoin? My own understanding of nature and of our proper relation to it is ultimately traceable to a metaphysics that could be broadly described as panpsychist, in that it attributes an internal principle, or subjectival dimension, to matter generally. I have explored such a metaphysic elsewhere, and do not propose..

: How we understand the world (our metaphysical premise) determines, to a large degree, how we treat it. How we treat our world constitutes our basic modality. Our basic modality colors everything we do—our entire culture takes its cue from it. Three basic modalities are here distinguished. The first is the modality of pre-materialist or traditional, religion-based societies. This is a modality of importuning, the seeking of assistance from supernatural sources. The second is the modality of materialist or modern, secular (...) societies. This is a modality of instrumentalism, involving mastery, control, and a will to re-make the world in accordance with human ends. The third is the modality of prospective post-materialist societies. These societies would be post-religious but not post-spiritual. Their modality would be one of letting the world unfold according to its own nature, and, by extension, finding creative synergies between human and nonhuman conativities. This modality of synergy is explicated by reference to the Daoist notion of wu wei. (shrink)