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The French philosopher and sociologist Bruno Latour (*1947) is a major figure of contemporary thought. This book provides a comprehensive overview of the Latourian oeuvre, from his early anthropological studies in Abidjan (Ivory Coast) to his influential books like Laboratory Life and Science in Action and his most recent reflections on an empirical metaphysics of “modes of existence.” The book argues that the basic problem to which Latour’s work responds is that of social tradition, i.e. the complex relationship of culture, knowledge, and time. It shows that Latour’s understanding of this problem is deeply informed by his early involvement with Biblical exegesis, in particular the work of the German theologian Rudolf Bultmann. Against this background, the book questions the innovative potential of actor-network theory (ANT) and the fruitfulness of Latour’s philosophical attempts to understand the plurality of “modes of existence.”

Deep Time, Dark Times takes its bearing from Nietzsche’s concern that a surfeit of history can extinguish the passion for life, especially when we are reminded of our capacity for cruelty and folly. The prospect of devastating climate change extends our sense of the past onto a geological scale, arousing debilitating passion, especially anger, ressentiment and resignation. What can Nietzsche teach us here? Hume’s sense that reason is but a slave to the passions cautions us against new utopian blueprints that fail to address the mood of today. Although climate change can rightly be laid at the feet of industrialization, corporate greed, fossil fuel companies … Deep Time challenges us to re-imagine ourselves as a species, through a geological consciousness. This expands Nietzsche’s sense of “life” to include our fellow terrestrials, and accentuates his sense of critical history, navigating between conflicting passions. Such a consciousness would be ecological (embracing yet another wound to our sovereignty), and it would acknowledge the advent of the Anthropocene. Deep Time draws on Heidegger’s call for a new attunement, one that connects contemporary anger and frustration with the agency vacuum created by the failure of global democracy. The question of who “we” are, when we imagine emergent forms of agency, or when we consider the constituencies impacted by climate change, is explicitly thematized. Information technology, for all its liabilities, offers new possibilities of group identity-formation, communication, and economic transaction that just might make a difference. We have to will the impossible to avoid the unthinkable.

This book launches a new mode of philosophical and ethical reflection with respect to the challenges posed by the degradation of the natural environment. While the work of French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), with its relentless interrogation of the anthropocentric metaphysics of presence, has already proven highly influential in posthumanism and animal studies, the present volume builds on these insights in addressing the most pressing environmental issues of our time. The volume brings together fifteen scholars from a wide variety of related fields, including eco-phenomenology, eco-hermeneutics, new materialism, posthumanism, animal studies, science and technology studies, environmental humanities, eco-criticism, earth art, and analytic environmental ethics. Overall, eco-deconstruction offers an account of differential relationality explored in an ecological context, both quasi-ontologically and quasi-normatively, with attention to diagnosing our times. Accordingly, the book is divided into four sections—Diagnosing the Present, which suggests that our times are marked by a flattened-out understanding of time and thus in need of deconstructive dispositions; Ecologies, which mobilizes the spectral ontology of deconstruction to argue for the constitutive ecological embeddedness of mortal life; Nuclear and Other Biodegradabilities, in which contributors reflect on the remains and by-products of human culture, including nuclear waste and species extinctions; and Environmental Ethics, which uncovers a demand for justice that emerges as a response to original differentiation and the mortality and alterity it installs in living beings. As such, the book may resonate with readers not only in philosophy, but across the humanities and the social and natural sciences.

Environmental aesthetics today harbors a wide range of perspectives, and crosses several commonly recognized divides: between analytic and continental philosophy, Eastern and Western traditions, universalizing and historicizing approaches, and theoretical and practical concerns. This volume sets out to show how these perspectives can be brought into conversation with one another. The first part gives a clear survey of the development of the field, and discusses some important future directions for environmental aesthetics. It points to new topics, such as the inclusion of everyday artifacts, human activities, and social relations. The second part explains how widening the scope of environmental aesthetics demands a continual rethinking of the relationship between aesthetics and other fields. How does environmental aesthetics relate to ethics? Does aesthetic appreciation of the environmental entail an attitude of respect? And what is the relationship between the theory and practice? The third part is devoted to the relationship between aesthetics of nature and aesthetics of art. To what extend can art help inform our “environmental imagination”? Can art help “save the earth”? The final part illustrates the emergence of practical applications from theoretical studies, and focus on concrete case studies. It shows how Kant’s and Dewey’s aesthetic can be used to defend the beauty of wind farms. And shouldn’t we, besides learning to “think like a mountain” (Aldo Leopold) also learn “to think like a mall”. And finally, how can an aesthetic appreciation for wild animals be understood?

This book reconstructs the emergence of the phenomenon of “lost time,” i.e. the interval between stimulus and response, with respect to the German physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894) and the French writer Marcel Proust (1871-1922). It argues that the discovery and explanation of this phenomenon was closely tied to the functioning of laboratory technologies. In the winter of 1849/50, Helmholtz conducted pioneering measurements concerning the propagation speed of stimulations in the living nerve in Königsberg by using electromagnetic devices and graphical instruments. When presenting his findings in the Parisian Academy of Science, he coined the term “lost time” in order to illustrate the delays accompanying the functioning of nerves. In the 1910s, Proust adopted the same expression from the popular writings of the French physiologist Etienne-Jules Marey.

Husserl’s Missing Technologies looks at the early-twentieth-century “classical” phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, both in the light of the philosophy of science of his time, and retrospectively at his philosophy from a contemporary “postphenomenology.” Of central interest are his infrequent comments upon technologies and especially scientific instruments such as the telescope and microscope. Together with his analysis of Husserl, Don Ihde ventures through the recent history of technologies of science, reading and writing, and science praxis, calling for modifications to phenomenology by converging it with pragmatism. This fruitful hybridization emphasizes human–technology interrelationships, the role of embodiment and bodily skills, and the inherent multistability of technologies. In a radical argument, Ihde contends that philosophies, in the same way that various technologies contain an ever-shortening obsolescence, ought to have contingent use-lives.

In Interdependence, biologist Kriti Sharma offers a tightly argued, richly exemplified, and impressively coherent alternative to the popular view that interdependence simply means “independent things interacting.” Sharma systematically builds up a view of interdependence as mutual constitution—a detailed explanation of how things come into being at all dependent on one another. Sharma takes the reader step-by-step through increasingly sophisticated arguments, illustrating each point with vivid examples from the biological sciences and from everyday living. Called “a model of accessible but serious and eloquent science writing” (Evan Thompson, University of British Columbia), Interdependence will be of interest both to scholars (in biology, philosophy, cognitive science, and literary theory) and to general readers interested in engaging this fascinating and timely topic. Clear, concise, and insightful, Interdependence is one of the first books to explicitly offer a coherent and practical philosophy of interdependence and will help shape what interdependence comes to mean in the twenty-first century.

Modern environmentalism has come to realize that many of its key concerns— “wilderness” and “nature” among them— are contested territory, viewed differently by different people. Understanding nature requires science and ecology, to be sure, but it also requires sensitivity to history, culture, and narrative. In response, this volume brings together essays by philosophers on the questions that hermeneutics— the “art and science of interpretation”— raises for environmental philosophy. Providing a snapshot of how a hermeneutical turn in environmental philosophy represents a new form of environmental philosophy, the essays in this collection offer fresh ways of looking at traditional problems of environmental philosophy and environmental ethics. Significantly, the authors suggest the human understanding of nature centres on mediation— the mediation that grounds the interpretive task of connecting fact and meaning, through a number of different structures and forms. At the same time, this collection expands the concerns of environmental philosophy. The first section of this edited collection investigates the task of interpretation as a way of thinking environmentally. The following sections explore particular issues of interpretation. The second section explores the hermeneutics of the environmental self. Section three investigates the ways that narrativity contributes to our understanding of nature. The final section raises questions of time and place in light of environmental ethics.

“Yes, Kant did indeed speak of extraterrestrials.” This phrase could provide the opening for this brief treatise of philosofiction (as one speaks of science-fiction). With these aliens that Kant must have taken seriously as no one else in the history of philosophy did, what must be questioned above all else are the limits of globalization, or what Kant called cosmopolitanism. Yet before reading Kantian considerations of the inhabitants of other worlds, before comprehending his reasoned alienology, we work our way through an analysis of the star wars raging above our heads. And we start by envisaging current international treaties that regulated the law of space and the figure of those cosmopirates that Carl Schmitt sometimes mentioned in his late writings. Turning then to track the comings and goings of extraterrestrials in Kant’s work, it becomes clear that they are the necessary condition for an unattainable definition of humanity. Impossible to represent, escaping any possible experience, they are nonetheless inscribed in the very heart of the sensible. They are the Archimedean point of the sensible from whose perspective its distribution is woven. Reading Kant, and reading him in dialogue with science-fiction films he seems to have already seen, involves making him speak of the pressing questions that often oppress us: our endangered planet, ecology, the war of the worlds. But it also means attempting to think, with or beyond him, what a point of view might be.

Phenomenology, biology, and the human sciences combine in this work to support an original systematic philosophy of nature, organic life, and human existence. A sequence of increasingly complex modes of boundary relations—or relations between the insides and outsides of a thing—is presented and analyzed. The sequence supports distinctions between living and nonliving things, plants and animals, lower animals and higher ones, and nonhuman animals and humans. “Organic life” is defined and its characteristic features—the “organic modals”—are elucidated. The boundary relations of living things can be understood as “positionality”—that is, orientation to and within an environment. Human positionality is both centric (as in many animals) and excentric insofar as the relation between inside and outside is something to which the human being is “positioned.” This excentric positionality enables human beings to stand outside of the boundaries of their own body, a possibility with significant implications for human knowledge, culture, religion, and technology. Through articulation of the essential features of organic life, its distinction from and relation within nonliving nature, and the distinctions among living things, including between the nonhuman and human, the work provides foundations for a philosophical anthropology.

This book is an interdisciplinary work in environmental humanities that puts Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy into dialogue with evolutionary biology, animal studies, and literature, arguing for evolutionary continuity between human cultural and linguistic behaviors and the semiotic activities of other animals. It departs from most philosophic and critical animal studies which retain the traditional view of human exceptionalism. Differing from other studies of Merleau-Ponty’s work, this book emphasizes his lifelong attention to science, showing how his examination of evolutionary biology, embryology, and ethology anticipated recent studies of animal behavior, cognition, and communication. Each chapter explores literary questioning of human-animal relations from The Epic of Gilgamesh and Euripides’s Bacchae to Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. Chapter 1 introduces Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of embodiment and dynamic intersubjectivity and chiasm in the context of the phenomenology introduced by Husserl and his proté;gé; Heidegger, with special emphasis on Merleau-Ponty’s engagement with science. Chapter 2 examines his exploration of animal studies and human animality, in which he insists that there is no evolutionary rupture between our species and other animals but instead a “strange kinship.” The final chapter explores Merleau-Ponty’s theory of language as embodied and gestural, placing it in the context of animal communication, especially among apes. It closes by examining his view that literature and the other arts are a distinctively human manifestation of the sedimentation of experience produced by all life forms on the planet. Here he anticipated the findings of biosemiotics.

Contemplative or “noetic” knowledge has been traditionally regarded as the highest mode of understanding, a view persisting in many non-Western cultures and in Eastern Christianity, where “thēoria physikē” (the illumined understanding of creation following the purification of the heart) is seen to provide deeper insights into nature than the discursive rationality modernity has used to dominate and conquer it. Working from texts in Eastern Orthodox philosophy and theology not widely known in the West, with a variety of other sources including mystics such as Maximos the Confessor and the Sufi Ibn ’Arabi; poets such as Basho, Traherne, Blake, Hölderlin, and Hopkins; Russian Orthodox philosophers such as Florensky and Bulgakov; and nature writers like Muir, Thoreau, and Dillard, this book challenges both the primacy of the natural sciences in environmental thought and the conventional view, first advanced by Lynn White, Jr., that Christian theology is somehow responsible for the environmental crisis. Instead, the ancient Christian view of creation as iconic, its “holy beauty” manifesting divine energies and constituting a primal mode of divine revelation, offers the best prospect for the radical reversal that is needed in our relation to the natural environment. Advancing beyond Heidegger’s apocalyptic talk of gods and anticipation of an unthinkable Ereignis to overcome our technological framing of the environment, this book offers environmental philosophy, ecotheology, and ecocriticism elements for rethinking our relation to the natural world that can be found not only in non-Western traditions, but manifest in the Christian East and concealed within Western Christianity itself.

The unprecedented proliferation of discourses and techniques concerning the living being has left philosophy in a stupefying situation. We no longer know what phenomenon deserves to be called “life,” and we no longer know how to ask the question “what is life?” The traditional way of understanding life as self-appropriating and self-organizing process of not ceasing to be, of taking care of one's own hunger, is challenged. This challenge entails questioning fundamental concepts of metaphysical thinking, namely, time, finality, and above all being and existing. In this study, the author proposes some basics elements for the question concerning life through readings of Aristotle, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida; through the discussion of scientific breakthroughs in thermodynamics and evolutionary and developmental biology; and through the re-examination of the notion of hunger in both its metaphysical and its political implications.

With the rise of cognitive science and the revolution in neuroscience, it is now commonplace to assume that the study of a human person—a thinking, feeling, acting subject—is ultimately the study of the human brain. In both Europe and the United States, massive state-funded research is focused on mapping the brain in all its remarkable complexity. The metaphors employed are largely technological: A wiring diagram of synaptic connectivity will lead to a better understanding of human behavior and perhaps insights into the breakdown of human personhood with diseases of the brain such as Alzheimer’s. Alongside this technologized discourse of the brain as locus of human subjectivity we find another perspective, one that emphasizes its essential plasticity—in both the developmental sense and as a response to traumas such as strokes, tumors, or gunshot wounds. This book investigates how the “neural subject” of the twenty-first century came to be. Taking approaches both historical and theoretical, the chapters probe the possibilities and limits of neuroscientific understandings of human experience. Topics include landmark studies in the history of neuroscience, the relationship between neural and technological “pathologies,” and analyses of contemporary concepts of plasticity and pathology in cognitive neuroscience. Central to the volume is a critical examination of the relationship between pathology and plasticity. Because pathology is often the occasion for neural reorganization and adaptation, it exists not in opposition to the brain’s “normal” operation but instead as something intimately connected to our ways of being and understanding.

The Space Age is over? Not at all! A new planet has appeared: Earth. In the age of the Anthropocene, the Earth is a post-natural planet that can be remade at will, controlled and managed thanks to the prowess of geoengineering. This new imaginary is also accompanied by a new kind of power—geopower—which takes the entire Earth—in its social, biological and geophysical dimensions—as an object of knowledge, intervention, and governmentality. Far from merely being the fruit of the spirit of geo-capitalism, this new grand narrative has been championed by the theorists of the constructivist turn (be them ecomodernist, postenvironmentalist, or accelerationist to name a few) who have also called into question the great divide between nature and culture; but in the aftermath of the collapse of this divide, a cyborg, hybrid, flexible nature was built, an impoverished nature that does not exist without being performed by the technologies, human needs, and capitalist imperatives. Underneath this performative vision resides a hidden “a-naturalism” denying all otherness to nature and the Earth, no longer by externalizing it as a thing to be dominated, but by radically internalizing it as something to be digested. Constructivist ecology can hardly present itself in opposition to the geo-constructivist project, which also claims that there is no nature and that nothing will prevent human beings from replacing Earth with an Earth 2.0.