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Author: Susan Dunston
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498552978
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 153
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Book Description
At the core of Emerson’s philosophy is his view as a naturalist that we are “made of the same atoms as the world is.” In counterpoint to this identity, he noted the fluid evolution and diversity of combinations and configurations of those atoms. Thus, he argued, our “relation and connection” to the world are not occasional or recreational, but “everywhere and always,” and also reciprocal, ongoing, and creative. He declared he would be a naturalist, which for him meant being a knowledgeable “lover of nature.” Emerson’s famous insistence on an “original relation to the universe” centered on morally creative engagement with the environment. It took the form of a nature literacy that has become central to contemporary environmental ethics. The essential argument of this book is that Emerson’s integrated philosophy of nature, ethics, and creativity is a powerful prototype for a diverse range of contemporary environmental ethics. After describing Emerson’s own environmental literacy and ethical, aesthetic, and creative practices of relating to the natural world, Dunston delineates a web of environmental ethics that connects Emerson to contemporary eco-feminism, living systems theory, Native American science, Asian philosophy, and environmental activism.
Author: Susan Dunston
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498552978
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 153
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Book Description
At the core of Emerson’s philosophy is his view as a naturalist that we are “made of the same atoms as the world is.” In counterpoint to this identity, he noted the fluid evolution and diversity of combinations and configurations of those atoms. Thus, he argued, our “relation and connection” to the world are not occasional or recreational, but “everywhere and always,” and also reciprocal, ongoing, and creative. He declared he would be a naturalist, which for him meant being a knowledgeable “lover of nature.” Emerson’s famous insistence on an “original relation to the universe” centered on morally creative engagement with the environment. It took the form of a nature literacy that has become central to contemporary environmental ethics. The essential argument of this book is that Emerson’s integrated philosophy of nature, ethics, and creativity is a powerful prototype for a diverse range of contemporary environmental ethics. After describing Emerson’s own environmental literacy and ethical, aesthetic, and creative practices of relating to the natural world, Dunston delineates a web of environmental ethics that connects Emerson to contemporary eco-feminism, living systems theory, Native American science, Asian philosophy, and environmental activism.
Author: Andrew McMurry
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820325309
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 296
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Book Description
Through contemporary environmental philosophy and emerging paradigms in complex systems theory, Andrew McMurry presents a new reading of Emerson, Thoreau, and the green tradition in American thought. McMurry analyzes Emerson and Thoreau's foundational roles in the formation of the two main currents in American environmentalism: the managerial, or "shallow," and the radical, or "deep." The author draws, in particular, on Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela's theory of autopoesis and the social systems theory of Niklas Luhmann. These theories, says McMurry, give us the conceptual tools to update Emerson and Thoreau's philosophies of nature, literary aesthetics, and attitudes toward pastoralism for the current age of environmental risk and uncertainty. McMurry's systems approach helps us to recast essentialist, ultimately debilitating binaries such as nature/culture, wilderness/civilization, and wild/tame along the lines of a suppler, richer distinction: that between self-organizing systems (like language or society) and their environments (defined simply as whatever cannot communicate with the system). Such an undertaking also allows McMurry to reflect on the systemic obstacles that ecocriticism, as a genre enabling positive environmental practices, must confront if it is to be theoretically coherent. Sophisticated and socially relevant, Environmental Renaissance is both a call for critics to broaden their parameters and a warning about rhapsodizing on nature while our very life-support systems are crumbling.
Author: Charles Taylor
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674987691
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 155
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Book Description
“Charles Taylor is a philosopher of broad reach and many talents, but his most striking talent is a gift for interpreting different traditions, cultures and philosophies to one another...[This book is] full of good things.” —New York Times Book Review Everywhere we hear talk of decline, of a world that was better once, maybe fifty years ago, maybe centuries ago, but certainly before modernity drew us along its dubious path. While some lament the slide of Western culture into relativism and nihilism and others celebrate the trend as a liberating sort of progress, Charles Taylor calls on us to face the moral and political crises of our time, and to make the most of modernity’s challenges. “The great merit of Taylor’s brief, non-technical, powerful book...is the vigor with which he restates the point which Hegel (and later Dewey) urged against Rousseau and Kant: that we are only individuals in so far as we are social...Being authentic, being faithful to ourselves, is being faithful to something which was produced in collaboration with a lot of other people...The core of Taylor’s argument is a vigorous and entirely successful criticism of two intertwined bad ideas: that you are wonderful just because you are you, and that ‘respect for difference’ requires you to respect every human being, and every human culture—no matter how vicious or stupid.” —Richard Rorty, London Review of Books
Author: Philip Cafaro
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820336661
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
Thoreau's Living Ethics is the first full, rigorous account of Henry Thoreau's ethical philosophy. Focused on Walden but ranging widely across his writings, the study situates Thoreau within a long tradition of ethical thinking in the West, from the ancients to the Romantics and on to the present day. Philip Cafaro shows Thoreau grappling with important ethical questions that agitated his own society and discusses his value for those seeking to understand contemporary ethical issues. Cafaro's particular interest is in Thoreau's treatment of virtue ethics: the branch of ethics centered on personal and social flourishing. Ranging across the central elements of Thoreau's philosophy—life, virtue, economy, solitude and society, nature, and politics—Cafaro shows Thoreau developing a comprehensive virtue ethics, less based in ancient philosophy than many recent efforts and more grounded in modern life and experience. He presents Thoreau's evolutionary, experimental ethics as superior to the more static foundational efforts of current virtue ethicists. Another main focus is Thoreau's environmental ethics. The book shows Thoreau not only anticipating recent arguments for wild nature's intrinsic value, but also demonstrating how a personal connection to nature furthers self-development, moral character, knowledge, and creativity. Thoreau's life and writings, argues Cafaro, present a positive, life-affirming environmental ethics, combining respect and restraint with an appreciation for human possibilities for flourishing within nature.
Author: Eduardo Cadava
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804728140
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276
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Book Description
This book brings together a wide range of materials from history, religion, philosophy, horticulture, and meteorology to argue that Emerson articulates his conception of history through the language of the weather. Focusing on Emerson's persistent use of climatic and meteorological metaphors, the book demonstrates that Emerson's reflections on the weather are inseparable from his preoccupation with the central historical and political issues of his day. The author suggests that Emerson's writings may be read as both symptomatic and critical of the governing rhetorics through which Americans of his day thought about the most important contemporary issues, and that what has often been seen as Emerson's retreat from the arena of history into the domain of spirit is in fact an effort to re-treat or rethink the nature of history in terms of questions of representation. What distinguishes this book from the work of other critics who are reassessing Emerson's relation to history is its attempt to think through the way in which the figures of Emerson's rhetoricfigures (like frost, snow, the auroras, and nature in general) which often seem to have nothing to do with either history or politicsare themselves traversed by the conflictual histories of slavery, race, destiny, revolution, and the meaning of America. It differs, that is, in proposing a textual model for reading Emerson that measures his engagement with changing historical and political relations in terms of the way he works to revise the language he inherits. There can be no reading of Emerson, the author suggests, that does not trace the movement of his figures and tropes as they become something else, as they open onto questions of history.
Author: Allen Carlson
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231138864
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 478
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Book Description
Nature, Aesthetics, and Environmentalism: From Beauty to Duty addresses the complex relationships between aesthetic appreciation and environmental issues and emphasizes the valuable contribution that environmental aesthetics can make to environmentalism. Allen Carlson, a pioneer in environmental aesthetics, and Sheila Lintott, who has published widely in aesthetics, combine important historical essays on the appreciation of nature with the best contemporary research in the field. They begin with the scientific, artistic, and aesthetic foundations of current environmental beliefs and attitudes. Then they offer views on the conceptualization of nature and the various debates on how to properly and respectfully appreciate nature. The book introduces positive aesthetics, the belief that everything in nature is essentially beautiful, even the devastation caused by earthquakes or floods, and the essays in the final section explicitly bring together aesthetics, ethics, and environmentalism to explore the ways in which each might affect the others. Book jacket.
Author: J. Baird Callicott
Publisher: Macmillan Library Reference
ISBN: 9780028661377
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 1127
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Book Description
Presents essays that cover topics in the fields of environmental philosophy and ethics, including green chemistry, urban environments, desertification, vegetarianism, animal ethics, and waste management.
Author: Rick Anthony Furtak
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823239306
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 313
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Book Description
Although Henry David Thoreau's best-known book, Walden, is admired as a classic work of American literature, it has not yet been widely recognized as an important philosophical text. In fact, many academic philosophers would be reluctant to classify Thoreau as a philosopher at all. The purpose of this volume is to remedy this neglect, to explain Thoreau's philosophical significance, and to argue that we can still learn from his polemical conception of philosophy.Thoreau sought to establish philosophy as a way of life and to root our philosophical, conceptual affairs in more practical or existential concerns. His work provides us with a sustained meditation on the importance of leading our lives with integrity, avoiding what he calls "quiet desperation." The contributors to this volume approach Thoreau's writings from different angles. They explore his aesthetic views, his naturalism, his theory of self, his ethical principles, and his political stances. Most importantly, they show how Thoreau returns philosophy to its roots as the love of wisdom.
Author: Bob Jickling
Publisher: African Sun Media
ISBN: 199120129X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 292
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Book Description
This well-constructed, and highly original, sourcebook integrates educational materials for teaching environmental ethics with theoretical reflections. The book is set to contribute immensely to its aim of taking ethics out of philosophy departments and putting it into the streets, into villages, and on the Earth—to make ethics an everyday activity, not something left to experts and specialists. Context-based activities are presented in almost every chapter. While it acknowledges foundational theories in environmental ethics, and the work that they continue to do, it wholeheartedly embraces a growing body of literature that emphasises contextual, process-oriented, and place-based approaches to ethical reflection, deliberation, and action. It walks on the ground and isn’t afraid to get a little dirty or to seek joy in earthly relationships. And it ultimately breaks with much Western academic tradition by framing “ethics in a storied world”, thus making room to move beyond Euro-American perspectives in environmental issues. This work will be of interest to school teachers and other non-formal and informal educators, teacher educators, college instructors, university professors, and other professionals who wish to bring environmental ethics to the forefront of their pedagogical practices.
Author: J. Baird Callicott
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820319848
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 716
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Book Description
The Great New Wilderness Debate is an expansive, wide-ranging collection that addresses the pivotal environmental issues of the modern era. This eclectic volume on the varied constructions of “wilderness” reveals the recent controversies that surround those conceptions, and the gulf between those who argue for wilderness "preservation" and those who argue for "wise use." J. Baird Callicott and Michael P. Nelson have selected thirty-nine essays that provide historical context, range broadly across the issues, and set forth the positions of the debate. Beginning with such well-known authors as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and Aldo Leopold, the collection moves forward to the contemporary debate and presents seminal works by a number of the most distinguished scholars in environmental history and environmental philosophy. The Great New Wilderness Debate also includes essays by conservation biologists, cultural geographers, environmental activists, and contemporary writers on the environment.
