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Environmental Philosophy and Ecological Thought
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Environmental Philosophy and Ecological Thought

A special issue of Philosophies (ISSN 2409-9287).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (29 February 2024) | Viewed by 8627

Special Issue Editor

Prof. Dr. Michael Marder

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
1. IKERBASQUE, Basque Foundation for Science, 48009 Bilbao, Spain
2. Department of Philosophy, University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU), 48940 Leioa, Spain
Interests: phenomenology; ethical and political philosophy; environmental philosophy
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to invite you to contribute to the new Special Issue of Philosophies dedicated to “Environmental Philosophy and Ecological Thought.” In light of the accelerating and mutually reinforcing processes of global heating, biodiversity loss, deforestation, topsoil degradation, and the acidification of the oceans, wreaking havoc around the planet, environmental philosophy has become the fastest-growing subfield in the discipline. As such, it is the subfield that is extremely relevant to life and death in the twenty-first century. It holds the potential to reach beyond the narrow circle of specialists to policy makers, activists, and members of the general public. Nonetheless, without interdisciplinary inputs, environmental philosophy is bound to become too insulated and remain confined to the ivory tower of academia. That is why it needs to join forces with ecological thought, relying on insights from literary and cultural studies, the arts, anthropology, biology (including plant sciences and biophysics, for example) and, of course, ecology, among others. A fecund interaction of environmental philosophy and ecological thought will permit us not so much to give the most efficient answers to today’s and tomorrow’s environmental problems but to raise sharper questions so as to gauge the depth and the root causes of the current crisis. If we are, as a philosopher once said, at the cusp where the end of philosophy meets the beginning of thinking, this unique meeting place is at the juncture of environmental philosophy and ecological thought. 

This Special Issue aims to stimulate a productive and interdisciplinary exchange between the fields of environmental philosophy and ecological thought.

In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome. Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following:

  • Intergenerational environmental justice;
  • The rights and subject status of ecosystems and other-than-human beings;
  • Mystical ecologies;
  • Philosophy and Indigenous ecological practices and thought;
  • New philosophies of nature (or nature-culture) in and for the twenty-first century;
  • Methodological issues in environmental philosophy and ecological thought;
  • The status of the whole: total ecological interrelatedness and philosophies of the One;
  • The Anthropocene examined within the fold of environmental philosophy and ecological thought;
  • Theories of ecocide;
  • Disaster, catastrophe, apocalypse: visions of the end and negativity in contemporary environmental discourses;
  • Non-crisis-related interactions of environmental philosophy and ecological thought;
  • Geoengineering from the perspectives of environmental philosophy and ecological thought;
  • AI, ecological thought, and environmental philosophy;
  • Environmental philosophy, ecological thought, and the effects (eco-anxiety, guilt, immersive joy…).

I look forward to receiving your contributions.

Prof. Dr. Michael Marder
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Philosophies is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • environmental philosophy
  • ecological thought
  • philosophy of nature
  • justice
  • crisis
  • the Anthropocene
  • geoengineering

Published Papers (7 papers)

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Research

14 pages, 257 KiB  
Article
The Emergence of Ur-Intentionality: An Ecological Proposal
by Manuel Heras-Escribano and Daniel Martínez Moreno
Philosophies 2024, 9(3), 54; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies9030054 - 25 Apr 2024
Viewed by 701
Abstract
Radical enactivism supports radical embodied cognition (REC), which is the idea that basic or fundamental cognition (perception and action) does not need to be understood in representational, contentful terms. REC departs from the idea that the mind can be naturalized through biological functions, [...] Read more.
Radical enactivism supports radical embodied cognition (REC), which is the idea that basic or fundamental cognition (perception and action) does not need to be understood in representational, contentful terms. REC departs from the idea that the mind can be naturalized through biological functions, but rejects the idea that mental content, which is understood as having a representational nature, can be naturalized. For REC, the natural origins of content (or NOC) is a program based on the following hypothesis: first, we depart from basic cognitive processes that are target-based and guided by an Ur-intentionality or directedness toward the world, and then sociality enters in the picture when language appears into the scene, allowing for establishing full-blown semantic content in which that content is about worldly states of affairs. Here, I am going to focus on the phenomenon of directedness since there are blind spots in this picture: as many authors claim, REC takes Ur-intentionality as the starting point, but there is simply no explanation to date of how this directedness or Ur-intentionality is established. Therefore, how could we account for Ur-intentionality? How does this kind of intentionality emerge? We believe that we can answer this question if we invoke the best scientific evidence from ecological perceptual learning especially in regard to the role of the environment and the information for perceiving affordances in our learning processes. This allows us to offer an answer to the question of how the most basic form of cognition (Ur-intentionality or directedness) emerges in nature. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Environmental Philosophy and Ecological Thought)
11 pages, 224 KiB  
Article
The Nascent State
by Filipe Ferreira
Philosophies 2024, 9(2), 43; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies9020043 - 27 Mar 2024
Viewed by 681
Abstract
I suggest here ecologies of the nascent state, posing the following general questions: what is this state and what is it to live, to fabricate modes of life, in its immanence? I believe populating this state is, by right, ‘ecological’, even if what [...] Read more.
I suggest here ecologies of the nascent state, posing the following general questions: what is this state and what is it to live, to fabricate modes of life, in its immanence? I believe populating this state is, by right, ‘ecological’, even if what I offer here is only a sketch or glimpse, playful as it is, of the possibility of such modes of life, of dwelling. As I develop it here, the nascent is in flight of being. It is populated by lesser, minoritarian existences. If it is ‘ecological’, it is because these existences, or modes of becoming, are themselves, in their own right, ‘ecologies’, that is, modes of dwelling, of life, on the ‘other side of existence’, as Antonin Artaud put it once, in exile from Being. The power to return eternally to the nascent state is the power to live, to dwell, in the absolute forgetfulness of Being, in the interstice where philosophy supposedly ends, but where it nevertheless begins again, in oblivion itself, where being is never already the verticality of Being, its difference with beings, but always nascent, in the beginning, eternally so. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Environmental Philosophy and Ecological Thought)
10 pages, 204 KiB  
Article
Animal Pneuma: Reflections on Environmental Respiratory Phenomenology
by Lenart Škof
Philosophies 2024, 9(2), 33; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies9020033 - 05 Mar 2024
Viewed by 801
Abstract
This essay is an attempt to propose an outline of a new respiratory animal philosophy. Based on an analysis of the forgetting of breath in Western philosophy, it aims to gesture towards a future, breathful and compassionate world of co-sharing and co-breathing. In [...] Read more.
This essay is an attempt to propose an outline of a new respiratory animal philosophy. Based on an analysis of the forgetting of breath in Western philosophy, it aims to gesture towards a future, breathful and compassionate world of co-sharing and co-breathing. In the first part, the basic features of forgetting of breath are explained based on David Abram’s work in respiratory ecophilosophy. This part also introduces an important contribution to modern philosophy by Ludwig Klages. The second part is dedicated to reflections on what I understand as an unfortunate transition from soul and pneuma to spirit and Geist. Based on these analyses, I proceed towards an idiosyncratic thought on the nocturnal mystery of pneuma, with references to ancient Upanishadic and 20th-century phenomenological Levinasian thought. Based on these teachings, I argue that, at the bottom of her existence, the subject is a lung partaking in an immense external lung (Merleau-Ponty). In the fourth part of the essay, I extend my reflections toward comparative animal respiratory phenomenology and argue for the immense compassion for all our fellow breathing beings. Finally, in the concluding, fifth part of this essay, I am arguing for a future biocentric and breathful environment, signifying and bringing a new compassionate-respiratory alliance into the world. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Environmental Philosophy and Ecological Thought)
13 pages, 213 KiB  
Article
Subjunctivity
by Timothy Morton and Treena Balds
Philosophies 2024, 9(1), 29; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies9010029 - 19 Feb 2024
Viewed by 1243
Abstract
We explore the value of the subjunctive mood as a template for understanding ethical action and the theological ontology that undergirds it. We do this by examining the use of a strange but very precisely used word in the writing of a theologian [...] Read more.
We explore the value of the subjunctive mood as a template for understanding ethical action and the theological ontology that undergirds it. We do this by examining the use of a strange but very precisely used word in the writing of a theologian and minister and poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: "silly." We do so in the name of exploring the value of contingency, accidentality and abjection to a general theory of ecological thought. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Environmental Philosophy and Ecological Thought)
9 pages, 223 KiB  
Article
Ecocosmism: Finitude Unbound
by Giovanbattista Tusa
Philosophies 2024, 9(1), 27; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies9010027 - 16 Feb 2024
Viewed by 977
Abstract
Western modernity was born with a revolution of limits. Western man, who has become the creator of his own destiny, has identified freedom with a conscious and systematic violation of the given conditions, with a future that constantly transcends the present. This modern [...] Read more.
Western modernity was born with a revolution of limits. Western man, who has become the creator of his own destiny, has identified freedom with a conscious and systematic violation of the given conditions, with a future that constantly transcends the present. This modern condition is thus characterised by the fact that it is limited by boundaries that are mobile and can change. From this observation arises the paradoxical situation that growth today is inconceivable if it is not linked to a scenario of scarcity, in contrast to premodern theological views based instead on the abundance of creation, the original richness of the world. Inspired by this vision of a sustainable world, ecological thinking today is immediately associated with a language of finitude. Degrowth, self-limitation, and resource efficiency, these are all terms associated with a universalist model of progress that seems to know no limits. This article argues that the world is doomed to its own inevitable end if sustainability is understood from the perspective of an economically sustainable future defined by the limits of capitalist management. If, on the other hand, we step out of this impoverished and economic perspective of the concept of limit and the condition of finitude, then we open ourselves to an ecocosmic perspective that understands the world as part of a cosmic diversity that cannot be contained within a more or less extended totality of resources. In this article, being finite is understood ecologically as being a non-self-sufficient part of the interrelated possibilities of worldmaking, not as an element of a set of individuals or things. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Environmental Philosophy and Ecological Thought)
8 pages, 221 KiB  
Article
Exilic Ecologies
by Michael Marder
Philosophies 2023, 8(5), 95; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies8050095 - 09 Oct 2023
Viewed by 1483
Abstract
A term of relatively recent mintage, coined by German scientist Ernst Haeckel in 1866, ecology draws on ancient Greek to establish and consolidate its meaning. Although scholars all too often overlook it, the anachronistic rise of ecology in its semantic and conceptual determinations [...] Read more.
A term of relatively recent mintage, coined by German scientist Ernst Haeckel in 1866, ecology draws on ancient Greek to establish and consolidate its meaning. Although scholars all too often overlook it, the anachronistic rise of ecology in its semantic and conceptual determinations is noteworthy. Formed by analogy with economy, the word may be translated as “the articulation of a dwelling”, the logos of oikos. Here, I argue not only that a vast majority of ecosystems on the planet are subject to environmental upheavals and ecological crises, but also that ecology as the crossroads of dwelling and articulation is in crisis, having come into its own and made explicit what was silently present in its historical enunciation. As a result, ecology needs to be deromanticized, decoupled from the bucolic and the picturesque, and dissociated from nativism and autochthony. Every organism, ecosystem, or place is affected by the forces of unsettlement and displacement; all dwellings and their articulations are shaken to the core and set in motion, rendering ecologies exilic. Ecologies today share the exilic condition, which also threatens to level the differences among them, without the chance of returning to a stable origin, itself nothing other than a theoretical fiction. In what follows, I propose to chalk out the outlines of exilic ecologies. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Environmental Philosophy and Ecological Thought)
13 pages, 294 KiB  
Article
Repression and Return of Nature in Hegel and Beyond
by Marina Marren
Philosophies 2023, 8(5), 80; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies8050080 - 31 Aug 2023
Viewed by 1341
Abstract
Taking its departure from the destruction of ethicality (Sittlichkeit), as envisioned by Hegel in the Phänomenologie des Geistes (PG §443–475), this paper constructs a concept of a contemporary subject whose self-reliant autonomy fractures in the face of the truth. This [...] Read more.
Taking its departure from the destruction of ethicality (Sittlichkeit), as envisioned by Hegel in the Phänomenologie des Geistes (PG §443–475), this paper constructs a concept of a contemporary subject whose self-reliant autonomy fractures in the face of the truth. This truth is revealed as an upsurge of nature, whose role and significance has been denied in favor of comfort and security of the subject. The move to yoke and subdue nature by placing science—as Bacon saw fit—in service of technology, and by placing technology in service of human comfort and safety, proved to bear fruit. However, this subjugation, and also the abuse of nature, in one and the same move, results in a subjugation and a denigration of the human self. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Environmental Philosophy and Ecological Thought)
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