Environmental Philosophy and Ethics

4. Modern Culture

2. Medieval Cosmos: Dante

  • Dante Alighieri (1265-1321); Divine Comedy.
  • Robert Pogue Harrison. Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (1992).
  • Entire earth becomes a garden.
  • Will of civilization to overcome nature and achieve mastery of the earth.

3. Dante's Cosmos

  • The Divine Comedy is salvation history.
  • Inferno: Dante's bewilderment in the dark forest. Descent into inferno.
  • Purgatory: A forest of the earthly paradise. A garden park.
  • Paradise: Ascent through celestial spheres to heavenly paradise; a garden flowering in Christ.

4. Organic Cosmos: Athanasius Kircher

  • 1601-1680. German mathematician and philosopher
  • Mundus Subterraneus (1665).
  • Descent into Mount Vesuvius, 1638.

5. Athanasius Kircher

6. Rediscovery of Classical Traditions: Claude Lorrain

  • France.
  • 1600-1682.
  • Classical landscapes.
  • Geometrical Order.
  • Pagan happiness, simplicity, bucolic feeling.
  • Rejection of the wild.

7. The Domination of Nature: Francis Bacon

  • 1561-1626.
  • Counsel, Attorney General, Lord Chancellor for James I, beginning in 1603.
  • Due to Fall from Eden, humanity lost its "dominion over creation."

8. Bacon's Novum Organum

  • The New Organon, 1620.
  • "Man can recover that right over nature which belongs to it by divine bequest."
  • Man should "establish and extend the power and dominion of the human race over the entire universe."

9. The Mechanistic World View: René Descartes

  • French philosopher, 1596-1650.
  • Discourse on Method, 1637.
  • Mind-body dualism.
  • "I think, therefore I am."
  • Mathematics as basis of truth.
  • Principles of Philosophy, 1644.
  • Matter in motion.

10. Mechanical Materialism: Thomas Hobbes

  • English political philosopher, 1588-1679.
  • Mechanical materialism.
  • "Life is but a motion of limbs."
  • "What is the heart, but a spring; and the nerves, but so many strings; and the joints, but so many wheels."

11. Mechanical Society: Hobbes's Leviathan

  • Leviathan, 1651
  • Mechanical model of society.
  • State of nature is chaos, anarchy.
  • Life is nasty, brutish, and short.
  • Competitive; self-interest.
  • Social contract theory of government is solution.

12. Private Property: John Locke

  • English philosopher and politcal theorist, 1632-1704.
  • Mixing one's labor with the soil gives one title to the land as private property.
  • God commanded man to "subdue the earth."

13. Mechanistic Science: Isaac Newton

  • English Scientist, 1642-1727.
  • Matter is inert and passive unless acted on by an external force.
  • Mathematical cosmos.
  • Ideal spheres, point sources of gravitation, identity through change.

14. Newton's Principia Mathematica

  • Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, 1687 (Bk I only, 1686).
  • Three laws of motion.
  • Law of Gravitation.
  • Differential calculus.
  • Opticks, 1706. "God formed matter in sold, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable particles." Atomic theory.

15. Clocklike Universe

  • Model of universe as a clock.
  • Precise, controlled, predictable motions.
  • God as clockmaker, engineer, mathematician.
  • God winds up his clock and lets it tick away into eternity.

16. 18th Century Age of Enlightenment

  • Louis XIV Hermitage.
  • Optimism over human progress.
  • Control over nature.
  • Formal designed gardens.
  • Displays of power and privilege.

17. Critical Theory and Domination: Theodor Adorno

  • German philosopher, 1903-1969.
  • Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944, with Max Horkheimer).
  • Objective Reason versus Instrumental Reason.
  • "The fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant" (Ecology, p. 59)
  • "What men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order wholly to dominate it and other men." (Ecology, p. 60)

18. Critical Theory and Domination: Max Horkheimer

  • German philosopher. 1895-1973. Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944, with Theodor Adorno).
  • "The disenchantment of the world is the extirpation of animism."(Ecology, 60)
  • "Identity constitutes the unity of nature." (62)
  • Nature . . . is that which is to be comprehended mathematically." (63)

19. Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (1947)

  • Once it was the endeavor of art, literature, and philosophy to express the meaning of things and of life, to be voice of all that is dumb, to endow nature with an organ for making known her sufferings. . . Today nature's tongue is taken away. Once it was thought that each utterance, word, cry, or gesture had an intrinsic meaning; today it is merely an occurance." (p. 101)

20. Herbert Marcuse

  • 1898-1979. U.C. San Diego.
  • "Ecology and Revolutuion," (1972)
  • Nature is "an ally;" "a life force." Need for "a letting be."
  • "Monopoly capitalism is waging a war against nature." (Ecology, p. 68)
  • "Nature . . . is a symbol of beauty, of tranquility, and of a non-repressive order." (p. 68)

21. Robyn Eckersley

  • Australia, University of Melbourne.
  • Environmentalism and Political Theory (1992).
  • Failed promise of critical theory.
  • Need an ecocentric approach to overcome domination.