"Applies Emmanuel Levinas's thought in approaching environmental philosophy from both humanistic and nonanthropocentric points of view, arguing that themes at the heart of his work--the significance of the ethical, responsibility, alterity, the vulnerability of the body, bearing witness, and politics--are important for thinking about many of our most pressing contemporary environmental questions" --Provided by publisher.

How might human beings be called to exercise virtue, which is to say, modes of acknowledgement, humility, and discernment, in regard to the impending (no matter how distant chronologically) extinction of the human species? It is argued that the inevitable extinction of the human species be affirmed as a good, in spite of how daunting and uncanny this act might be. This affirmation is called for as humans struggle to find an ethical response appropriate to their creaturely existence, as well (...) as to their devastating complicity in a historical and geological moment of mass species extinction. (shrink)

The study of landscape and place has become an increasingly fertile realm of inquiry in the humanities and social sciences. In this new book of essays, selected from presentations at the first annual meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Geography, scholars investigate the experiences and meanings that inscribe urban and suburban landscapes. Gary Backhaus and John Murungi bring philosophy and geography into a dialogue with a host of other disciplines to explore a fundamental dialectic: while our collective and personal (...) activity modifies the landscape, in turn, the landscape modifies human identities, and social and environmental relations. Whether proposing a peripatetic politics, conducting a sociological analysis of building security systems, or critically examining the formation of New York City's municipal parks, each essay sheds distinctive light on this fascinating and engaging aspect of contemporary environmental studies. (shrink)

The Cove, a recent documentary on the harvesting and slaughter of dolphins in Taiji Japan, envisions this practice as a mode of blasphemy. While the reintroduction of a notion of blasphemy into the search for inter-species justice can illuminate the intensity of the evil one witnesses, one must be wary of this notion’s ethical, political and social implications. In place of a politics of outrage that is deployed by the film, an argument is made for a politics of expiation. In (...) a politics of expiation one begins one’s conversation with the alleged wrongdoer/blasphemer in penitential rather than accusatory witness. (shrink)

The Cove, a recent documentary on the harvesting and slaughter of dolphins in Taiji Japan, envisions this practice as a mode of blasphemy. While the reintroduction of a notion of blasphemy into the search for inter-species justice can illuminate the intensity of the evil one witnesses, one must be wary of this notion’s ethical, political and social implications. In place of a politics of outrage that is deployed by the film, an argument is made for a politics of expiation. In (...) a politics of expiation one begins one’s conversation with the alleged wrongdoer/blasphemer in penitential rather than accusatory witness. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty advances a notion of witness in The Visible and the Invisible, which could be termed “gestate.” Gestate witness involves an acknowledgement through one's own body of how another living entity is born into its own body. This notion of witness is helpful in answering Anthony Weston's challenge that a sufficiently positive notion of environmentalism and so of environmental responsibility be developed, one that takes seriously how we come into contact with a more-than-human animate world. The work of biologist Tarn (...) Ream with Trillium ovatum serves as a case study in the aesthetic, ethical and ontological significance of gestate witness. (shrink)

Drawing on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, James Hatley uses the prose of Primo Levi and Tadeusz Borowski, as well as the poetry of Paul Celan, to question why witnessing the Shoah is so pressing a responsibility for anyone living in its aftermath. He argues that the witnessing of irreparable loss leaves one in an irresoluble quandary but that the attentiveness of that witness resists the destructive legacy of annihilation. "In this new and sensitive synthesis of scrupulous thinking about the (...) Holocaust (beginning with scruples about the term Holocaust itself), James Hatley approaches all the major questions surrounding our overwhelming inadequacy in the aftermath of the irreparable. If there is anything unique (in a non-trivial sense) about the Holocaust, surely it is the imperious moral urgency that compels those who contemplate it to revise their view of what it means to be human, and to bear witness to such an event. (shrink)

Beginning in story and memoir, an appeal is made for the practice of “paranoiesis,” a mode of knowing appropriate to dwelling in the company of other living kinds. Paranoiesis is particularly called for in responding to the twin legacies of ecocide and genocide at work in the extirpation of Buffalo across the high plains. Philosophical responses to this plight are called upon to cultivate “rough knowledge,” a mode of hearing the other’s speaking—both human and more-than-human—that eschews dialectical opposition and negative (...) critique for the sake of dialogical fluency and torsion. (shrink)

Beginning in story and memoir, an appeal is made for the practice of “paranoiesis,” a mode of knowing appropriate to dwelling in the company of other living kinds. Paranoiesis is particularly called for in responding to the twin legacies of ecocide and genocide at work in the extirpation of Buffalo across the high plains. Philosophical responses to this plight are called upon to cultivate “rough knowledge,” a mode of hearing the other’s speaking—both human and more-than-human—that eschews dialectical opposition and negative (...) critique for the sake of dialogical fluency and torsion. (shrink)

Employing the rabbinical practice of midrashic reading in order to unfold a passage from The Song of Songs, the manner in which a European/colonial affirmation of the seasons, particularly the season of spring, might become a mode of injustice in a non-temperate climate is explored. The wilding of seasons imposed by colonial usurpation of country finds a particular case study in the invasion of Arrente lands in Australia by buffel grass even as the effects of climate change are being felt. (...) In conclusion, an argument is made for recasting the practice of midrashic reading in order to render the seasons as they are found in TheSong of Songs vulnerable to unanticipated intonations of the seasons as they emerge in Arrente country. (shrink)

In his philosophical journal The Inward Morning, Henry Bugbee appeals to the Daodejing to derive principles, particularly that of ziran, of “self-soing,” by which one is guided in thinking heedfully. In this way, one is called reflexively into responsibility for and by things in what Bugbee terms their “density” and “omnirelevance.” Through Bugbee’s unique notion of wilderness as “emergent togetherness,” the periodicity and fluency cultivated in ecological contemplation refines the practice of natural history, such that it is attuned to the (...) manner in which one is called to be at home and so ecologically responsive among the ten-thousand things. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Textualities: Between Hermeneutics and DeconstructionJames HatleyTextualities: Between Hermeneutics and Deconstruction, by Hugh J. Silverman; 269 pp. New York: Routledge, 1994, $16.95 paper.Especially indebted to the thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jacques Derrida, Silverman’s Textualities elaborates a practice of reading drawing on hermeneutics, semiology, and deconstruction. In “juxtaposing” hermeneutic and deconstructive approaches to reading, Silverman shows how these two modes of thought both interrogate and supplement one another. Silverman’s (...) approach to this daunting task revolves around his notion of “textuality.”Textuality is not easy to define. Silverman himself speaks of it as being a “meaning-structure” opened up in a text but not necessarily contiguous with it. “The text,” Silverman argues, “is what is read, but its textuality or textualities is how it is read” (p. 81). For example, insofar as one reads any text as an autobiography, one has become engaged in autobiographical textuality. The fact that one might read an autobiographical text, such as Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, as a philosophical text as well suggests that a given text might be implicated in any number of textualities. For this reason, one cannot simply assign the text to a single genre as if this assignment defined the limits of the text’s meaning.Textualities emerge as the text a reader confronts elicits in the reader a certain competency to read. This competency, Silverman argues, originates neither in the self of the reader, nor in the reader’s world, nor in the codes or metalanguages constituting the semiological axes of the text. In this assertion, Silverman exceeds the hermeneutical practice of Ricoeur and Gadamer, both [End Page 262] of whom were anxious in some manner to ground the meaning of a text in its writer or “first” reader. According to Silverman, the competency to read a text only emerges insofar as the reader “gives expression to the text, which itself asserts the interpretation” (p. 79). The reader, inextricably caught up in a “middle voice,” both reads and is read by the text. Only in this “between” where neither hermeneutics nor semiology takes precedence, where neither world nor code makes a claim for the origin of the text’s meaning, can a competency to read occur.While Silverman’s language runs very abstract in the earlier, more theoretical section of his book, later sections fill out the notion of textuality by engaging in readings of a series of texts grouped around three selected textualities: autobiographical, visible/scriptive, and institutional. The texts chosen range from Thoreau’s Walden to Cezanne’s paintings, from Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques to Blanchot’s essay, “Le ‘discours philosophique.’” In his treatment of each text, Silverman shows how a specific textuality is configured in terms of a series of “indecidables.” For instance, in Thoreau’s Walden, both fiction and nonfiction are at play in the text’s autobiographical textuality. Lying between fiction and nonfiction, Walden can be read juxtaposed against a series of other texts, such as Rousseau’s Confessions, or Montaigne’s Essays, in which the same “indecidability” is at play, although with a difference.Besides giving an account of textuality, Silverman’s book also functions as “a presentation and evaluation of continental philosophy from Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty to Foucault and Derrida” (p. 1). The first section engages in an interrogation of the phenomenological tradition, particularly insofar as it involves a theory of reading or interpreting texts. Silverman argues that descriptive phenomenology, the sort that has been appropriated by literary theorists such as Hirsch and Ingarden, cannot fully respond to the “richness, multiplicity, and even ambiguity of the literary object” (p. 14). Silverman is only interested in phenomenology insofar as it becomes an interpretive rather than descriptive practice. Thus, he emphasizes the thought of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty at the expense of Husserl.Textualities is a complex and ambitious work. While it too easily dismisses Husserlian phenomenology and at times seems too schematic, it offers a comprehensive and original reading of continental philosophy and its praxes of reading.James HatleySalisbury State UniversityCopyright © 1996 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)