Environmental thinkers recognize that ecological thinking has a vital role to play in many wise choices and policies; yet, little theoretical attention has been given to developing an adequate philosophical psychology of the imaginative nature of such thinking. Ecological imagination is an outgrowth of our more general deliberative capacity to perceive, in light of possibilities for thinking and acting, the relationships that constitute any object. Such imagination is of a specifically ecological sort when key metaphors, (...) images, symbols, and the like used in the ecologies shape the mental simulations we use to deliberate—i.e., when these interpretive structures shape what John Dewey calls our “dramatic rehearsals.” There is an urgent practical need to cultivate ecological imagination, and an equally practical need to make theoretical sense of the imaginative dimension of ecological reflection. (shrink)

Relational philosophies developed in classical American pragmatism and the Kyoto School of modern Japanese philosophy suggest aims for greater ecological responsiveness in moral education. To better guide education, we need to know how ecological perception becomes relevant to our deliberations. Our deliberations enlist imagination of a specifically ecological sort when the imaginative structures we use to understand ecosystemic relationships shape our mental simulations and rehearsals. Enriched through cross-cultural dialogue, a finely aware ecological imagination can (...) make the deliberations of the coming generation more trustworthy. (shrink)

Josef Pieper’s insight into Aquinas’s metaphysics, that “createdness determines entirely and all-pervasively the inner structure of the creature,” applies equally to philosopher William Desmond.1 For at the heart of Desmond’s metaphysical project lies a refusal to take creation for granted, a challenge to Bertrand Russell’s assertion that “the universe is just there, and that’s all.”2 Desmond work aims at “renewing metaphysical astonishment before the enigma of being that was, and is, and always will be too much for us, in excess (...) of our groping efforts.”3 This “enigma of being” arouses a sense of astonishment at creation’s givenness, “that it is,” and at creation’s contingency, for all that is “might not have been .. (shrink)

The environmental degradation caused by industrial agriculture, as well as the resulting social and health consequences, creates an urgency to rethink food production by expanding the moral imagination to include agricultural practices. Agricultural practices presume human use of the earth and acknowledge human dependence on the biotic community, and these relations mean that agriculture presents a separate set of considerations in the broader field of environmental ethics. Many scholars and activists have argued persuasively that we need new stories to (...) rethink agricultural practice, however, the link—the story that does and can shape agricultural practice—has not yet been fully articulated in environmental discourse. My analysis explores how language has shaped existing agricultural models and, more important, the potential of story to influence agricultural practice. To do this, I draw upon cognitive theory to illustrate how metaphoric and narrative language structures thought and influences practice, beginning with my contention that industrial agriculture relies on a discourse of mechanistic relations between humans and a passive earth, language that has naturalized the chemically intensive monocultures prevalent in much of the American Midwest. However, alternative agricultures, including organic agriculture, agro-ecology, and ecological agriculture, emphasize qualities such as interdependence and reciprocity and do so as a deliberate response to the perceived inadequacies of industrial agriculture and its governing narrative. Exploring the different discourses of agricultural systems can help us think through different modalities for human relations with the biotic community and demonstrate story’s potential role in altering practice. (shrink)

Re-Imagining Ecological Democracy offers an original, thought-provoking, and engaging treatment of why and how democracy should be re-imagined in reaction to today's ecological crisis. The book explains that one need to re-imagine both the view on nature and democratic ideals within the same framework in the Anthropocene, the present geological epoch of human-made instability in the Earth system and its planetary boundaries. This book proposes unique and challenging readings of green political theory and its development of ecological (...) democracy in the last four decades. The book is the first to offer a systematic and detailed interpretation of the role of critical theory vis-à-vis green political theory through an update regarding current non-anthropocentric critical theorists and how they may contribute to the further development of ecological democracy. Re-Imagining Ecological Democracy builds further on deep ecology, ecophenomenology, and animism by articulating an ecocentric view on nature which defends an intrinsic moral value of all existence as well as formulating the democratic principle of all ecologically affected parties. This book provides a sophisticated, convincing, and accessible argument for how to re-imagine ecological democracy as ecocentrism in practice: ecological love. To love ecologically means caring for and encountering all existence on the Earth and in the cosmos. This book is multi-disciplinary and will be of great value to researchers as well as undergraduate and postgraduate students from many disciplines. (shrink)

Experimental filmmaker Rose Lowder is an intricate explorer of perception. Many of her exquisite silent short films feature flowers that are scrutinized frame by frame in shots that appear to have layers, as well as volume, and to quiver between simultaneity and succession. Yet these perceptual palimpsests that present almost too much for the eye to take in also reveal an as yet unexplored relation to imagination. Informed by ecological principles and foregrounding floral beauty, Lowder's Bouquets create a (...) striking bond between perceptual and imaginative space. This article draws upon twentieth-century phenomenological accounts of perception before delving into earlier historical discussions of beauty in nature and in art, and bringing out connections to moral philosophy and feminist ecophilosophy, in order to understand how the beautiful entwines with ecological concern in the perceptual-imaginative space of her films. (shrink)

Drawing broadly on environmental philosophy, literary theory, settler colonial studies, decolonial theory, and speculative realism, Eggan quarries uncanny depictions of the natural world to unsettle not just the concept of nature but the coloniality of Nature. Unsettling Nature at once critiques Heidegger's home(l)y phenomenology and brings it forward through chapters on Willa Cather, D. H. Lawrence, Olive Schreiner, and Doris Lessing. The book concludes with a speculative proposal to transform eco-phenomenology into "exo-phenomenology," which emphasizes ways of being and perceiving that (...) bring us out of ourselves into contact with the Other, and into an encounter with the self as Othered. (shrink)

In this paper, we address the question of how an agent can guide its behavior with respect to aspects of the sociomaterial environment that are not sensorily present. A simple example is how an animal can relate to a food source while only sensing a pheromone, or how an agent can relate to beer, while only the refrigerator is directly sensorily present. Certain cases in which something is absent have been characterized by others as requiring ‘higher’ cognition. An example of (...) this is how during the design process architects can let themselves be guided by the future behavior of visitors to an exhibit they are planning. The main question is what the sociomaterial environment and the skilled agent are like, such that they can relate to each other in these ways. We argue that this requires an account of the regularities in the environment. Introducing the notion of general ecological information, we will give an account of these regularities in terms of constraints, information and the form of life or ecological niche. In the first part of the paper, we will introduce the skilled intentionality framework as conceptualizing a special case of an animal’s informational coupling with the environment namely skilled action. We will show how skilled agents can pick up on the regularities in the environment and let their behavior be guided by the practices in the form of life. This conceptual framework is important for radical embodied and enactive cognitive science, because it allows these increasingly influential paradigms to extend their reach to forms of ‘higher’ cognition such as long-term planning and imagination. (shrink)

Arguing that ecological thinking can animate an epistemology capable of addressing feminist, multicultural, and other post-colonial concerns, this book critiques the instrumental rationality, hyperbolized autonomy, abstract individualism, and exploitation of people and places that western epistemologies of mastery have legitimated. It proposes a politics of epistemic location, sensitive to the interplay of particularity and diversity, and focused on responsible epistemic practices. Starting from an epistemological approach implicit in Rachel Carson’s scientific projects, the book draws, constructively and critically, on (...) class='Hi'>ecological theory and practice, on (post-Quinean) naturalized epistemology, and on feminist and post-colonial theory. Analyzing extended examples from developmental psychology, from medicine and law, and from circumstances where vulnerability, credibility, and public trust are at issue, the argument addresses the constitutive part played by an instituted social imaginary in shaping and regulating human lives. The practices and examples discussed invoke the responsibility requirements central to this text’s larger purpose of imagining, crafting, articulating a creative, innovative, instituting social imaginary, committed to interrogating entrenched hierarchical social structures, en route to enacting principles of ideal cohabitation. (shrink)

This article focuses primarily on our research group’s year of preparation before the opening of a new K-7 publicly funded ecological ‘school’ for students aged 5–12. The article begins with a discussion of the reasons for seeking ways to change the values of a culture which fails to confront the consequences of its destructive practices, and for looking for a new approach to ecological education which sees the more-than-human world as an integral part of the learning situation. Five (...) principles are introduced and explained—principles that have grown out of the evolving experience of the research group, and then four ‘slogans’, which have served to guide the ongoing work of development, are described and illustrated. As part of the purpose of this project to change social and cultural values, the change of values within the research group during its ongoing work is also explored. (shrink)

The use of apocalyptic and post apocalyptic narratives to interpret the risk of environmental degradation and climate change has been criticized for too often making erroneous predictions on the basis of too little evidence, being ineffective to motivate change, leading to a discounting of present needs in the face of an exaggerated threat of impending catastrophe, and relying on a pre-modern, Judeo-Christian mode of constructing reality. Nevertheless, “Apocalypse,” whether understood in its technical sense as “revelation” or in its popular sense (...) as “end of the world as we know it,” remains a powerful way of creatively reimagining the world and of introducing questions of value and significance into discussions of climate change. (shrink)

Amidst increasing concerns about harmful ecological change brought about by human actions upon the earth, environmental thinkers and activists attempt to envision human relations with the earth in new ways. Such thinking, however, frequently comes up against an inability to conceive of the more-than-human world as something towards which we can empathize or sympathize or to which we owe justice. As such, a powerful force in environmental discourse sees this problem as intractable and sees ecological change as a (...) problem to be solved and the future of the earth as something to be managed rather than to explore new forms of relations with. This chapter explores Robert Waters’ art project uncover RECOVER in terms of this problem. His project activates a reflection on human life and social relations that fosters social healing and transformation. Is there a way to activate a similar process, but in terms of a natural healing of the earth and a social transformation of our relations to the earth? In considering this question, I explore Jason W. Moore and Raj Patel’s concept of “reparation ecology” and analyse how the idea of the Anthropocene blocks our capacities to think the reparation of human relations with the more-than-human world. I suggest that that Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concepts of becoming and sympathy offer a way of thinking human relations with earth others that could generate ethical and political responses to ecological change where the more-than-human world is considered as a co-participant and collaborator in human action and a subject to whom justice is owed. Sympathy with the non- human world acknowledges that human capacities are constituted by non-human materials and affects that do not respect the boundaries that tend to frame our thinking. Rather than continuing to allow our traditional assumptions about the separation of humans and nature to shape our relations to non-human world, imagining the human in new ways makes possible new forms of relations with the earth. I argue that attending to the ways that humans co-become with the non-human world affords opportunities for transforming human relations with the more-than-human world by fostering spaces for the emergence of new ecological sensibilities and potentials for social-ecological justice. (shrink)

‘‘COGNITIVE ECOLOGY’’ is a fruitful model for Shakespearian studies, early modern literary and cultural history, and theatrical history more widely. Cognitive ecologies are the multidimensional contexts in which we remember, feel, think, sense, communicate, imagine, and act, often collaboratively, on the fly, and in rich ongoing interaction with our environments. Along with the anthropologist Edwin Hutchins,1 we use the term ‘‘cognitive ecology’’ to integrate a number of recent approaches to cultural cognition: we believe these approaches offer productive lines of engagement (...) with early modern literary and historical studies.2 The framework arises out of our work in extended mind and distributed cognition.3 The extended mind hypothesis arose from a post-connectionist philosophy of cognitive science. This approach was articulated in Andy Clark’s Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again, and further developed by Susan Hurley and Mark Rowlands, among others.4 The distributed cognition approach arose independently, from work in cognitive anthropology, HCI (Human-Computer Interaction), the sociology of education and work, and science studies. The principles of distributed cognition were articulated in Hutchins’s ethnography of navigation, Cogni- tion in the Wild,5 and developed by theorists such as David Kirsh and Lucy Suchman.6 These models share an anti-individualist approach to cognition. In all these views, mental activities spread or smear across the boundaries of skull and skin to include parts of the social and material world. In remembering, decision making, and acting, whether individually or in small groups, our complex and structured activities involve many distinctive dimensions: neural, affective, kines-. (shrink)

What does imagination do for our perception of the world? Why should reality be broken off from our imagining of it? It was not always thus, and in these essays, Tim Ingold sets out to heal the break between reality and imagination at the heart of modern thought and science. Imagining for Real joins with a lifeworld ever in creation, attending to its formative processes, corresponding with the lives of its human and nonhuman inhabitants. Building on his two (...) previous essay collections, The Perception of the Environment and Being Alive, this book rounds off the extraordinary intellectual project of one of the world's most renowned anthropologists. Offering hope in troubled times, these essays speak to coming generations in a language that surpasses disciplinary divisions. They will be essential reading not only to for anthropologists but also for students in fields ranging from art, aesthetics, architecture and archaeology to philosophy, psychology, human geography, comparative literature and theology. (shrink)

Cognitive science is ready for a major reconceptualization. This is not at all because efforts by its practitioners have failed, but rather because so much progress has been made. The need for reconceptualization arises from the fact that this progress has come at greater cost than necessary, largely because of more or less philosophical (at least metatheoretical) straightjackets still worn - whether wittingly or not - by those doing the work. These bonds are extremely hard to break. Even some of (...) those who have directed powerful arguments against them have failed entirely to shake them off. The bonds are often attributed to the work of René Descartes, but they are really much older than that. If even in the present effort, I fail entirely to remove the straightjacket myself (even though I am making every attempt to get it off), this will testify to its tight grip. The straightjacket I am thinking about, of course, is the vague picture of the human situation that imagines centralized, internal minds in control of bodily machines. While almost no one in the contemporary cognitive science arena imagines minds to be the kind of thing Descartes took them to be - instantiations of a unique, fully non-material substance - there is nevertheless a deep resistance, even among the most fervent professed "materialists," to giving up this picture. In what follows, I shall try to offer an approach which on the one hand capitalizes on the excellent progress that has been made in cognitive science in the last few decades, and which on the other hand offers a general approach that may help at some level in the attempt to shake "Cartesian" bonds. The approach, as the alert reader already knows from the title of the essay, is an "ecological" approach. (shrink)

The main goal of the present research is to examine socio-ecological hypothesis on apology and compensation. Specifically, we conducted four studies to test the idea that an apology is an effective means to induce reconciliation in a residentially stable community, whereas compensation is an effective means in a residentially mobile community. In Studies 1, 2a and 2b, American and Japanese participants (national difference in mobility; Study 1) or non-movers and movers (within-nation difference in mobility; Studies 2a and 2b) imagined (...) the situations in which they were hurt by their friends and rated to what extent they would be willing to maintain their friendships upon receipt of apology or compensation. The results showed that compensation was more effective in appeasing residentially mobile people (i.e., Americans and movers) than stable people (i.e., Japanese and non-movers), while apology was slightly more effective appeasing residentially stable people than residentially mobile people (significant in Study 1; not significant in Studies 2a and 2b). In Study 3, by conducting an economics game experiment, we directly tested the hypothesis that mobility would impair the effectiveness of apology and enhance the effectiveness of compensation. The results again partially supported our hypothesis: In the high mobility condition compensation increased one’s willingness to continue the relationship with the offender, when compared to willingness in the low mobility condition. The importance of socio-ecological perspective on the forgiveness literature is discussed. (shrink)

Much insect sounding is beyond the limits of typical human hearing ability. This sonic separation is exacerbated by a socialized narrative of fear and avoidance of insects in many western societies. With the use of audio technologies to expand our senses, we can embrace opportunities to get to know sensory and communicative insect sound-worlds beyond our own. Ecological sound art – sound art that has an environmentalist intent – is a tangible and accessible means of listening to these sounds. (...) In the series Built Hidden Soundscapes, the primary author (Schonberg) composes imagined soundscapes existing solely of sounds that are beyond the limits of typical human hearing ability. In this article we introduce two compositions in this series, Reserva Florestal Adolpho Ducke and Pipeline Road. These compositions offer a temporary expansion of our aural senses that can increase listeners’ awareness of cryptic insect existences/ecologies. We suggest that this listening practice might prompt future auralization (sounding or hearing in the mind) of insect sound for the listener. (shrink)

’Sacrifice Imagined’ is an original exploration of the idea of sacrifice by one of the world’s pre-eminent philosophers of religion. Despisers of religion have poured scorn upon the idea of sacrifice as an index of the irrational and wicked in religious practice. Nor does its secularised form seem much more appealing. One need only think of the appalling cult of sacrifice in numerous totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. Yet, sacrifice remains a part of our cultural and intellectual ’imaginary’. Hedley (...) proposes good reasons to think that issues of global conflict and the ecological crisis highlight the continuing relevance of the topic of sacrifice for contemporary culture. The subject of sacrifice has been decisively influenced by two books: Girard’s ’The Violence and the Sacred’ and Burkert’s ’Homo Necans’. Both of these are theories of sacrifice as violence. Hedley’s book challenges both of these highly influential theories and presents a theory of sacrifice as renunciatio. (shrink)

Imagine a 5-stone weakling whose brain has been loaded with all the knowledge of a champion tennis player. He goes to serve in his first match – Wham! – His arm falls off. The 5-stone weakling just doesn’t have the bone structure or muscular development to serve that hard. There are, clearly, different types of knowledge/ability/skill, only some of which are a matter of what can be transferred simply by passing signals down a wire from one brain (or computer) to (...) another. Sometimes it is the body (the hardware) which knows. (shrink)

Imagination allows us to step out of the ordinary but also to transform it through our sense of wonder and play, artistic inspiration and innovation, or the eureka moment of a scientific breakthrough. In this book, Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei offers a groundbreaking new understanding of its place in everyday experience as well as the heights of creative achievement. -/- The Life of Imagination delivers a new conception of imagination that places it at the heart of our engagement (...) with the world—thinking, acting, feeling, making, and being. Gosetti-Ferencei reveals imagination’s roots in embodied human cognition and its role in shaping our cognitive ecology. She demonstrates how imagination arises from our material engagements with the world and at the same time endows us with the sense of an inner life, how it both allows us to escape from reality and aids us in better understanding it. Drawing from philosophy, cognitive science, evolutionary anthropology, developmental psychology, literary theory, and aesthetics, Gosetti-Ferencei engages a spectacular range of examples from ordinary thought processes and actions to artistic, scientific, and literary feats to argue that, like consciousness itself, imagination resists reductive explanation. The Life of Imagination offers a vital account of transformative thinking that shows how imagination will be essential in cultivating a future conducive to human flourishing and to that of the life around us. (shrink)

The concern people are now expressing about the human environment, ecology, pollution, and overpopulation, though admittedly legitimate from a moral point of view, has not attracted much attention from philosophers. This is notable particularly inasmuch as the United States civil rights struggle, the Vietnam War, and various responses of civil disobedience and violence to social problems have all aroused philosophers to careful thought on rights and obligations. I do not want to suggest that a social problem is interesting only if (...) it is philosophically interesting; nor do I want to make light of the way in which the problems of waste, noise, and overcrowding have captured the popular imagination. Yes, we must protect and use wisely the human environment and natural resources. But still, saying it seems banal, and philosophers do not feed on banalities. Here we have a modern moral commandment which speaks to an urgent and serious matter but which, like “Do not steal,” seems so obvious as to be trite. Yes, we must plan the world’s population in a rational way. Even that commandment, though disputed by some, seems trite. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 8.1 (2003) 74-92 [Access article in PDF] John Dewey's Aesthetic Ecology of Public Intelligence and the Grounding of Civic Environmentalism Herbert Reid and Betsy Taylor "[The problem is] that of recovering the continuity of esthetic experience with normal processes of living." John Dewey, Art as Experience "This is not a protest. Repeat. This is not a protest. This is some kind of artistic expression. Over." (...) --A call that went out on Metro Toronto police radios on May 16, 1998, the date of the first Global Street Party. Quoted from Naomi Klein, No LogoThis paper argues for the importance of John Dewey's aesthetic philosophy to recent efforts to cultivate civic environmentalism while critiquing narrowly conservationist environmentalisms. We call for a strong version of civic environmentalism oriented towards holistic integration of ecological [End Page 74] concerns into all aspects of social, political, economic, and cultural life. Such a civic environmentalism argues that it is not enough to strive to preserve enclaved 'wilderness' or 'biodiversity' (as important as that is). It argues also for fundamental changes in the political and economic status quo, because ecological havoc is understood to be integrally linked with the structural forces that are increasing inequality and weakening democratic publics. Strengthening of the civic commons is integral to protection of the environmental commons. If the environmental commons are the substantive goods in common which are the sustaining grounds of life, the civic commons are the institutions, collective memories, social networks, and skills that enable and inspire individuals to engage with each other in stewarding the common good. Such collective labor for the larger good requires some form of collective imagination which enables awareness of self and other (human or non-human) as inherently valuable. But beyond this, it requires perceptual and social infrastructures that nurture the ability to see self and other as emergent from and dependent on the supra-individual matrix that supports both life and individual. Central to such civic labor, is a non-dualistic understanding of individual/matrix. Such a non-dualistic understanding of self/other-in-matrix is central to political and ecological imaginations that are decentered from ethnic, species, class, gender, or other forms of domination and solipsism.John Dewey's work as a whole is a powerful call for such a non-dualistic understanding of individual-in-matrix, and few have better understood its connections to democracy. But, it is in his philosophy of art that Dewey describes most specifically the central importance of the aesthetic dimension of public culture to overcoming crippling dualisms of Western modernity that vitiate participatory engagement- individual/world, nature/culture, ends/means, leisure/work, art/science, aesthetic/ordinary. His writings on art have not been much utilized in the philosophical work for civic environmentalism. This paper argues for their relevance to its key goal of overcoming the segmentation of life ushered in by modernity and buttressed by these dualisms.We first give an overview of recent theories of civic environmentalism and the crises it engages of inequality, injustice, technocracy, corporatization, and the pervasive assault on place and thinning of public participation. Second, we look at the implications of Dewey'saesthetic ecology for an "environmentalism of daily life" that challenges the false dualisms of neo-liberalism and of technocratic professionalism that undermine place-based [End Page 75] forms of life and knowledge. Third, we draw on Dewey's aesthetic philosophy to suggest ways to rebuild democratic public space at the nexus of body, place, and commons. Finally, we briefly outline key philosophical questions that have emerged in our ethnographic and political study of Appalachian grassroots activisms, and that embody this sort of placed, democratic mobilization to protect the civic and environmental commons. American Environmentalism: Crisis and Challenge Toward the end of the last decade, veteran New York Times journalist and now independent writer Philip Shabecoff set out to engage "a broad spectrum of thoughtful and informed people within and without the environmental movement." His Earth Rising: American Environmentalism in the 21st Century offers a very... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 8.1 (2003) 74-92 [Access article in PDF] John Dewey's Aesthetic Ecology of Public Intelligence and the Grounding of Civic Environmentalism Herbert Reid and Betsy Taylor "[The problem is] that of recovering the continuity of esthetic experience with normal processes of living." John Dewey, Art as Experience "This is not a protest. Repeat. This is not a protest. This is some kind of artistic expression. Over." (...) --A call that went out on Metro Toronto police radios on May 16, 1998, the date of the first Global Street Party. Quoted from Naomi Klein, No LogoThis paper argues for the importance of John Dewey's aesthetic philosophy to recent efforts to cultivate civic environmentalism while critiquing narrowly conservationist environmentalisms. We call for a strong version of civic environmentalism oriented towards holistic integration of ecological [End Page 74] concerns into all aspects of social, political, economic, and cultural life. Such a civic environmentalism argues that it is not enough to strive to preserve enclaved 'wilderness' or 'biodiversity' (as important as that is). It argues also for fundamental changes in the political and economic status quo, because ecological havoc is understood to be integrally linked with the structural forces that are increasing inequality and weakening democratic publics. Strengthening of the civic commons is integral to protection of the environmental commons. If the environmental commons are the substantive goods in common which are the sustaining grounds of life, the civic commons are the institutions, collective memories, social networks, and skills that enable and inspire individuals to engage with each other in stewarding the common good. Such collective labor for the larger good requires some form of collective imagination which enables awareness of self and other (human or non-human) as inherently valuable. But beyond this, it requires perceptual and social infrastructures that nurture the ability to see self and other as emergent from and dependent on the supra-individual matrix that supports both life and individual. Central to such civic labor, is a non-dualistic understanding of individual/matrix. Such a non-dualistic understanding of self/other-in-matrix is central to political and ecological imaginations that are decentered from ethnic, species, class, gender, or other forms of domination and solipsism.John Dewey's work as a whole is a powerful call for such a non-dualistic understanding of individual-in-matrix, and few have better understood its connections to democracy. But, it is in his philosophy of art that Dewey describes most specifically the central importance of the aesthetic dimension of public culture to overcoming crippling dualisms of Western modernity that vitiate participatory engagement- individual/world, nature/culture, ends/means, leisure/work, art/science, aesthetic/ordinary. His writings on art have not been much utilized in the philosophical work for civic environmentalism. This paper argues for their relevance to its key goal of overcoming the segmentation of life ushered in by modernity and buttressed by these dualisms.We first give an overview of recent theories of civic environmentalism and the crises it engages of inequality, injustice, technocracy, corporatization, and the pervasive assault on place and thinning of public participation. Second, we look at the implications of Dewey'saesthetic ecology for an "environmentalism of daily life" that challenges the false dualisms of neo-liberalism and of technocratic professionalism that undermine place-based [End Page 75] forms of life and knowledge. Third, we draw on Dewey's aesthetic philosophy to suggest ways to rebuild democratic public space at the nexus of body, place, and commons. Finally, we briefly outline key philosophical questions that have emerged in our ethnographic and political study of Appalachian grassroots activisms, and that embody this sort of placed, democratic mobilization to protect the civic and environmental commons. American Environmentalism: Crisis and Challenge Toward the end of the last decade, veteran New York Times journalist and now independent writer Philip Shabecoff set out to engage "a broad spectrum of thoughtful and informed people within and without the environmental movement." His Earth Rising: American Environmentalism in the 21st Century offers a very... (shrink)

Contemporary debates in political ecology tend more and more to be held on the ontological level, where they are recomposed around the following alternative: should one conceive of nature as the order of reality that transcends society and that should be protected from the excesses of the latter? Or should one renounce the very partitioning of nature and society itself in order to imagine new, more sustainable, ecological arrangements? Examining both Bruno Latour’s and Jason Moore’s takes on this alternative (...) we argue that it should be overcome in favor of a naturalist and historical ontology of society inspired by the young Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. In this historico-naturalist perspective, social relations indeed appear as both determined by their environmental conditions as well as determining the uses of a collective make of its environment. The interest in this approach is to allow one to conceive of social alienation and environmental destruction as two sides of a same process which should therefore be conjointly addressed. (shrink)

To understand the evolution of imaginative culture, we need to understand its unique affective power. The purpose of this article is to explain our enjoyment of imaginative culture from the standpoint of a distinctive theoretical approach to understanding affect in terms of the dynamic and energetic features of consciousness. This approach builds upon John Dewey’s view of enjoyment as the enrichment of experience, adding perspectives from studies of the dynamics of consciousness and from ecological psychology. Its main thesis is (...) that positive affect is determined by the causal enrichment of experience, which is defined as the differentiated-ness of conscious states. This approach suggests that the affective power of imaginative culture lies in the way it affords experiences of enriched meaning, as exemplified by our enjoyment of highly nuanced emotion in music. (shrink)

This paper examines the relationship between perceiving and imagining on the basis of predictive processing models in neuroscience. Contrary to the received view in philosophy of mind, which holds that perceiving and imagining are essentially distinct, these models depict perceiving and imagining as deeply unified and overlapping. It is argued that there are two mutually exclusive implications of taking perception and imagination to be fundamentally unified. The view defended is what I dub the ecological–enactive view given that it (...) does not succumb to internalism about the mind-world relation, and allows one to keep a version of the received view in play. (shrink)

Sacrifice Imagined is an original exploration of the idea of sacrifice by one of the world's preeminent philosophers of religion. Despisers of religion have poured scorn upon the idea of sacrifice as an index of the irrational and wicked in religious practice. Nor does its secularised form seem much more appealing. One need only think of the appalling cult of sacrifice in numerous totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. Yet sacrifice remains a part of our cultural and intellectual 'imaginary'. Hedley (...) proposes good reasons to think that issues of global conflict and the ecological crisis highlight the continuing relevance of the topic of sacrifice for contemporary culture. The subject of sacrifice has been decisively influenced by two books: Girard's The Violence and the Sacred and Burkert's Homo Necans. Both of these are theories of sacrifice as violence. Hedley's book challenges both of these highly influential theories and presents a theory of sacrifice as renunciation of the will. His guiding influences in this are the much misunderstood Joseph de Maistre and the Cambridge Platonists. (shrink)

This paper introduces the important concept of a biophysical perspective on economics into the business ethics literature. The biophysical perspective recognizes that ecological processes determine what can be done in an economy and how best to do it. A biophysical perspective places the economic system into a larger context of the ecologic system. This changes the perception of ethical issues by identifying a larger scope of management decisions. The paper examines the changing ethical landscape in such issues as biotechnology, (...) planned obsolescence, productivity, and international trade. The paper also examines the shift in mindset associated with the shift in economic framework. It draws on the literature on cognitive structures and moral imagination to show this new perspective can actually raise the bar for ethical decision-making and behavior. The pattern is that the ethical behavior associated with a biophysical economic framework has a greater scope of responsibility with the benefit that the required ethical behavior leads to better long-term decision making. (shrink)

For decades now, environmental philosophers from Arne Næss to Freya Mathews have dreamt of environmental ethics that “make things happen.” We contend such ethics can be found in Nordic children’s tales—those scriptures of moral guidance, and influential propellers of environmental action. In this essay we discuss the moral-imaginative worlds of fictitious in Nordic children’s tales, choosing some of the most canonical stories of the Nordics as our focal point. We argue the complex and often inconsistent philosophical mediations between human and (...) more-than-human worlds as imagined by Astrid Lindgren, Selma Lagerlöf, Thorbjørn Egner, or Tove Jansson are as viable philosophical works as other, more systematic studies in environmental ethics. Further, we argue that places, or indeed larger geographical regions, animate the moral imagination of the characters who live there, suggesting there is a reciprocal and mutually enhancing relationship between dwelling, thinking, and acting, between being animated and becoming animateur. Indeed, we may speak of this animated and animating, cultural-ecological topos as part of a genuine Nordic Ecosphere. Coruscating in this ecosphere are the sparkles of ‘literary ecological ethics,’ which influence human actions, not as much through analysis, documentation, or argument as through world-making stories, images, and models of environmental heroines. (shrink)

Controlled elicitation of linguistic and psycholinguistic experimental data facilitate strong inferences about phonological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic structures and functions, yet neglect the ecological validity of responses. Ecological validity in this paper refers to whether data gathered under controlled conditions are commensurate with routine problem solving and language use in natural settings. All methods produce "white room" effects that compromise data gathering and analysis. Unexamined folk knowledge and experiences also guide the investigator s interpretation of data from field (...) research, laboratories, testing sessions, and target sentences. Story recall data from children in a combined second-third grade classroom and their narrative responses to cartoons without sound are used to illustrate ecological validity issues. The child's spontaneous, imaginative narratives about the story and cartoons resemble adult folk theory, and their semantic content reveal sociocultural knowledge essential for understanding subjects ' reasoning and information processing skills. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Imagination in Inquiry by A. Pablo IannoneAmy KindIANNONE, A. Pablo. Imagination in Inquiry. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2022. xxvi + 254 pp. Cloth, $110.00; eBook $45.00Though imagination is often associated with the fanciful and the fictional, over the course of the last decade philosophers have begun to devote considerable attention to more practical uses of imagination. Philosophers of imagination have increasingly focused on (...) ways in which imagination can play an important epistemic role in activities such as decision-making, planning, and scientific discovery; more generally, there has been attention to a variety of ways in which imagination can teach us about the world in which we live. Iannone’s discussion in Imagination in Inquiry can be seen as part of this general trend—even if his discussion is not itself situated directly within contemporary philosophy of imagination but, rather, in a broader interdisciplinary approach.Iannone works with an expansive conception of what imagination is. In his view, we should not limit our understanding of imagination simply to the ability to generate images. Rather, imagination is a diverse set of different abilities that aim “at figuring out cognitively, emotively, or practically, alternatives for dealing with actual, probable, plausible, foreseeable, or merely possible challenges or problems, abstract or concrete, theoretical or practical being faced, or notions being considered, and determining or deciding which is (are) preferable in the circumstances, and acting accordingly.” Moreover, this set of abilities should not be seen as operating in isolation; rather, imagination functions as part of an ecology of human abilities. Iannone refers to his view of imagination as the “homeostatic model,” so called because he sees imaginative processes as maintaining stability by way of a system of self-correcting feedback and methods for incorporating and adjusting to any new information received.Iannone also operates with an expansive conception of what counts as practical use of imagination. In his view, imagination is put to practical use in a wide range of circumstances, for example, when a dancer imagines the next steps of a dance in the process of spontaneous improvising, when a combatant imagines how to block an expected blow from an opponent, and when an environmental activist imagines a new set of corrective policies to address pollution. All these uses fall under the activity of what Iannone calls “inquiry,” that is, the activity of finding a solution to a problem or challenge. The problems and challenges that might prompt the use of imagination can be both personal and interpersonal, and the imaginative processes used will involve strategies such as discovery, creation, and anticipation.In the first part of the book, Iannone develops his basic conceptual apparatus. In the next part of the book, he puts this apparatus to work in the context of philosophy, that is, he shows how imagination plays a role in philosophical inquiry. In the third part of the book, he looks at the role of imagination in other disciplines such as sociology and psychology. Here, the interdisciplinary nature of his discussion is especially on display. In the fourth part of the book, he applies his model of imagination to a number of different contexts; in particular, he discusses the role of [End Page 354] imagination in language, in humor, in vision (both at the personal and the societal level), and in morality. Finally, the last part of the book offers a variety of case studies involving dance, technology, and artificial intelligence. Of the four chapters in this part of the book, three are written by other authors: two by Alejandra Iannone, a scholar and practitioner of dance and theater (and the author’s daughter), and one by Rocci Luppicini, an expert in technology studies. In light of the explosive pace with which new AI technologies are being developed, the book’s discussion of whether and how such technologies present challenges for our capacity for imagination is especially timely and important.In addition to affirming the practical importance of imagination, Iannone also affirms the practical importance of nurturing imagination—something he repeats at several points throughout the book. But how do we do this? One natural way that imagination is nurtured is simply by its regular use... (shrink)

New ways of relating to the earth and to each other are needed. This paper argues that dialogue with indigenous peoples provides a fruitful way of broadening our ecological imagination on what it means to ‘live well’ and offers a pathway for living an integral ecology. Their rich cosmovision encompasses and echoes many of the themes found within Catholic Social Teaching and within Latin America it is fostering a space for alternative narratives of well‐being and development to be (...) heard. The paper draws on empirical research with the Macushi people in Guyana. Three theological themes which ground the concept of relational well‐being are discussed: gratitude, reciprocity and solidarity. The cosmovision explored offers the hope that living an integral ecology is a constitutive part of authentic human flourishing and well‐being.© 2018 Trustees for Roman Catholic Purposes Registered. (shrink)

Aesthetic appreciation of landscape is by no means limited to the sensuous enjoyment of sights and sounds. It very often has a reflective, cognitive element as well. This sometimes incorporates scientific knowledge, e.g.,geological or ecological; but it can also manifest what this article will call 'metaphysical imagination', which sees or seems to see in a landscape some indication, some disclosure of how the world ultimately is. The article explores and critically appraises this concept of metaphysical imagination, and (...) some of the roles it can play in our aesthetic encounters. (shrink)

Automation is once again raising concerns about the threat it poses to employment. Feminists in the 20th century believed that technology could liberate women from undesirable labor. However, historically, industry and automation have not reduced women’s workloads but have instead favored unpaid work, flexibility, and work overload. Rather than mitigating the care and ecological crises, technological development has exacerbated them. This raises an important question for feminist theory: should technology be rejected as a way of reducing women’s workload? To (...) explore this, we analyze classical and contemporary contributions from feminist theorists on the future of work and technology. Using philosophical and feminist theoretical methods, our aim is to examine the relationships between these imaginings and home, family, design, and consumption. This article argues that a feminist analysis of work must include the technological dimension, considering the production of human beings as a strategic technology for feminist purposes. To imagine an alternative near future, the article draws on Donna Haraway’s making kin, emphasizing defamiliarization and refamiliarization of social and ecological relations, pluralist science, and technology for sustainable regeneration of life; and finally, as suggested in this analysis, the ironic persistence of labour in a post-industrial or post-capitalist era. (shrink)

Figurativity has attracted scholars' attention for thousands of years and yet there are still open questions concerning its nature. Figurativity and Human Ecology endorses a view of figurativity as ubiquitous in human reasoning and language, and as a key example of how a human organism and its perceived or imagined environment co-function as a system. The volume sees figurativity not only as embedded in an environment but also as a way of acting within that environment. It places figurativity within an (...) ecological context, and approaches it as a phenomenon which cuts across bodily, psychological, linguistic, social, cultural and natural environments. Figurativity and Human Ecology will appeal to those interested in the analysis of the all-encompassing creativity of the human mind and in the methodological difficulties associated with the study of cognition. (shrink)

From science and technology to business and education, curiosity is often taken for granted as an unquestioned good. And yet, few people can define curiosity. Curiosity Studies marshals scholars from more than a dozen fields not only to define curiosity but also to grapple with its ethics as well as its role in technological advancement and global citizenship. While intriguing research on curiosity has occurred in numerous disciplines for decades, no rigorously cross-disciplinary study has existed—until now. -/- Curiosity Studies stages (...) an interdisciplinary conversation about what curiosity is and what resources it holds for human and ecological flourishing. These engaging essays are integrated into four clusters: scientific inquiry, educational practice, social relations, and transformative power. By exploring curiosity through the practice of scientific inquiry, the contours of human learning, the stakes of social difference, and the potential of radical imagination, these clusters focus and reinvigorate the study of this universal but slippery phenomenon: the desire to know. -/- Against the assumption that curiosity is neutral, this volume insists that curiosity has a history and a political import and requires precision to define and operationalize. As various fields deepen its analysis, a new ecosystem for knowledge production can flourish, driven by real-world problems and a commitment to solve them in collaboration. By paying particular attention to pedagogy throughout, Curiosity Studies equips us to live critically and creatively in what might be called our new Age of Curiosity. (shrink)

Aldo Leopold accorded great significance to the images he used to describe both the land and humankind’s relation to it. Focusing on three key images of Leopold’s “ecological imaginary”—the balance, the pyramid, and the round river—this article argues that the most profound of these is the round river. Contrasting this image with James Lovelock’s portrayal of the earth as Gaia, it further argues that Leopold’s round river can be interpreted as a contemporary, ecological reworking of the primordial, Homeric (...) experience of Being, according to which the foundation of the world is a round river, Oceanus. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to examine the role of imagination in environmental ethics and introduce an imaginative dimension as an essential part of environmental ethics. Imagination constitutes a basic condition for ethical thinking and action. Matters of environmental ethics have revealed the indispensable role of imagination in ethics. I’ll advance an imagination-based environmental ethics by developing Hans Jonas’ ethical thought. From his viewpoint, various effects of our action on nature and future generations, generally out (...) of our sight, have become an ethical concern. This necessitates the exercise of imagination because we must “imagine” those distant effects to act in an environmentally responsible way. Jonas’ “heuristics of fear” is an imaginative approach necessary for responsible action. Further, I reinterpret the role of imagination as motivating our “will to know.” In conclusion, I suggest the importance of environmental education as cultivating ecological imagination from the standpoint of environmental ethics. (shrink)

An allergy is commonly understood to be an overreaction of the immune system to harmless substances that are misrecognised as foreign. This concept of allergy as an abnormal, misdirected immune response—a biological fault—stems from the idea that the immune system is an inherently defensive operation designed to protect the individual through an innate capacity to discriminate between the benign and toxic, or self and nonself. However, this definition of allergy represents a radical departure from its original formulation. Literally meaning ‘altered (...) reactivity’, the term was coined in 1906 by Austrian paediatrician Clemens von Pirquet, to describe the fundamentally mutable nature of the immune response.This paper argues that the conventional interpretation of allergy-as-pathology derives from specific concepts of ‘organism’, ‘response’, and ‘normal’ immune function that have—for over a century—governed the perception and study of immune phenomena within immunology. Through an examination of Louis Pasteur’s conceptualisation of the host body/microorganism relationship, I argue that immunology is founded on a view of the organism as a discrete, autonomous entity, and on a concomitant notion of the immune response as essentially reactive. Revisiting the concept of ‘altered reactivity’, this paper points to the fact that allergy was initially posited as a general theory of immune responsiveness and, importantly, one that poses a significant challenge to orthodox notions of immunopathology. It suggests that Pirquet’s unique view of immune responsiveness presents an account of organismic or biological identity that encapsulates, rather than reduces, its ecological complexity. (shrink)

While 'space' and 'place' appear as key concepts in the study of culture, their complexity and mutability require ever-new frameworks when approaching them critically. Including chapters by authors from different fields, career stages, and geopolitical backgrounds, the contributors in this edited collection scrutinize the changing dynamics of space and place in relation to current political, social, and environmental urgencies across the globe. With chapters investigating both real and imaginary spaces and places, the diversified discussions included in this collection provide a (...) cohesive study for disclosing latent understandings of multiple phenomena characterizing the world in which we live. From the protests in Egyptian and Turkish squares, to the power-related narratives embedded in institutional buildings, from the development of the commercial arena in Victorian and Edwardian London, to the effects of current environmental concerns on the evaluation of urban and rural locations, the volume ultimately serves as a progressive connection of fields, minds, and outlooks through an innovative, pluralistic vision. This interdisciplinary focus not only emphasizes the centrality of spaces and places when disentangling the complexities comprising our past and present, but also suggests a more pluralistic approach for exploring fundamental concepts in future spaces and places studies. (shrink)

Many Eastern European countries are on the edge of huge transitions in almost every sphere of life: political, economic, educational and religious. These changes have had an impact on the situation of women, many of whom entered into this time of transition believing that: socialism had solved the issue of gender inequality; what was obtained by socialism in the field of gender equality can be taken for granted; democracy will automatically deliver additional rights for women. However, all implemented patterns of (...) transition were hostile to gender equality. The consequences of soviet policy are still visible with respect to the environment and in attitudes towards ecology. The centralistic system of socialism was unable to tackle constructively the ecological crisis. The aim of this article is to indicate how ecofeminist theology can become a constructive framework for bringing women and men together, united by a common concern for the Earth, and a means of delivering alternative environmental policies for Eastern Europe. By acknowledging the connection between ecology and feminism, ecofeminist theology can become a transforming grace. (shrink)

This paper examines how indigenous African communities have become critical for developing epistemologies of relation and entanglement in the dominant problem of contemporary resilience understandings of adaptation in the Anthropocene imaginary. Grounded in the indigenous African epistemological philosophies, this paper explores critical alternative futural framings that directly oppose the modernist epistemological understandings of resilience imaginaries in the Anthropocene. The analysis presented here is based on understanding indigenous non-modern ways of knowing as key in the context of ecological crisis in (...) the Anthropocene resilience. This paper argues that reductionist modernist epistemology fails to fully acknowledge how alternative futural imaginaries of indigenous non-modern ways of knowing have become central to critical Anthropocene resilience approaches in the discipline of International Relations. In contrast, this paper explores indigenous African epistemologies of relation and entanglement as alternative futural imaginaries that better capture resilience climate adaptation in the Anthropocene. The paper concludes that focusing on resilience and understandings of adaptation in the Anthropocene opens other possibilities for the development of indigenous non-modern ways of knowing. (shrink)

Manifesto: reoccupying the collective imagination -- Green cultural citizenship -- Negotiating green cultural citizenship -- Media as ideological ecosystems -- Evolving media ecosystems -- Gardening media ecosystems -- Towards mediating an earth democracy.

COVID 19 has highlighted with lethal force the need to re-imagine and re-design the provisioning of human resources for health, starting from the reality of our radical interdependence and concern for global health and justice. Starting from the structured health injustice suffered by migrant workers during the pandemic and its impact on the health of others in both destination and source countries, I argue here for re-structuring the system for educating and distributing care workers around what I call a global (...) ecological ethic. Rather than rely on a system that privileges nationalism, that is unjust, and that sustains and even worsens injustice, including health injustice, and that has profound consequences for global health, a global ecological ethic would have us see health as interdependent and aim at “ethical place-making” across health ecosystems to enable people everywhere to have the capability to be healthy. (shrink)

In this wide-ranging and multidisciplinary volume, leading scholars, activists, journalists, and public figures deliberate about the creative and critical potential of public imagination in an era paradoxically marked by intensifying globalization and resurgent nationalism. Divided into five sections, these essays explore the social, political, and cultural role of imagination and civic engagement, offering cogent, ingenious reflections that stand in stark contrast to the often grim rhetoric of our era. Short and succinct, the essays engage with an interconnected ensemble (...) of themes and issues while also providing insights into the specific geographical and social dynamics of each author's national or regional context. Part 1 introduces the reader to theoretical reflections on imagination and the public sphere; Part 2 illustrates dynamics of public imagination in a diverse set of cultural contexts; Part 3 reflects in various ways on the urgent need for a radically transformed public and civic imagination in the face of worldwide ecological crisis; Part 4 suggests new societal possibilities that are related to spiritual as well as politically revolutionary sources of inspiration; Part 5 explores characteristics of present and potentially emerging global society and the existing transnational framework that could provide resources for a more humane global order. Erudite and thought-provoking, On Public Imagination makes a vital contribution to political thought, and is accessible to activists, students, and scholars alike. (shrink)