Abstract

Though ecology is mainly regarded as a sub-discipline of biology, today ecological problems are dealt with by different kinds of scientific and philosophical studies. As one of the new sub disciplines of philosophy, philosophical ecology tackles ecological problems from an ethical point of view and puts man’s responsibility for ecological disasters into question. Ecological analyses include not only human beings, but also animals and plants as well as the inanimate components of the environment such as soil, rocks, and water. On the other side, philosophical anthropology is concerned with human being as its object, putting aside other components of nature. Criticizing the so called conventional ethics which takes only human being as valuable, philosophical ecology tries to combine the ecological and anthropological perspectives and shed light on the ecological problems of our age. In this paper, I will try to show that an anthropocentric point of view cannot prevent ecological disasters without recognizing the ecological cycle in which each part can survive only connected with other parts but also that an ecological perspective cannot reach its aim without realizing the central position of human being in nature.