From the concept of Environmental Reason to a Global Ethics project

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Abstract

The contribution of the environmental philosophy to the XX and XXI centuries philosophy renovation and their capacity to be applied to all aspects of social life is the core of this essay. The history of philosophy on the West is focused on the human condition, the environmental philosophy drive its thought to a global view of biodiversity and geodiversity, enlarged by the concept of biosphere. The dominant perspective of the modern philosophy set the morale in the order of the rules and social conventions and leave the ethics on the field of personal experience. Analyzing the concept of Kantian reason, and its ethic’s corollaries, this essay propose develop them to a new concept, “Environmental Reason”. Conceptualized as a new categorical imperative to the men’s action, beyond the principle that prescribe that we must conform individual acts with a universal law, configuring the human conduct within the limits that safeguard the continuity of life, but also the intrinsic values of earth and its biodiversity and geodiversity. A new perspective ethics founded in the principles of the critique of anthropocentrism and the critique of ethnocentrism represent a new ontology, and a new epistemology, that could lead to a new ethics universal theory.

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Pragmatism and Evolutionary Epistemology

Michele Marsonet (2017)

To understand the significance of a pragmatist stance in this matter we must address a basic question: which kind of evolution are we referring to when talking of “evolutionary epistemology”? If we take evolution to be an undifferentiated concept, such that no useful distinction can be found in it, we are on a wrong track. The evolutionary “pattern” is certainly one, but this should not lead us to assume that the specific characteristics of mankind must be left out of the picture, either because they are not important or because no specifically human characteristic is admitted. Nicholas Rescher’s evolutionary framework, for example, is instead pluralistic and multi-sided. It is worth noting how and why Rescher’s evolutionary epistemology differs from the one delineated in a famous book by Karl Popper. The Austrian-born philosopher based his approach on the “random conjectures and refutation” model. A scientist, for example, faces the problem of explaining nature’s doings by one of the endlessly many hypotheses that he has at his disposal. Subsequently he chooses to endorse a conjecture from this infinite range, and the testing itself, via falsification, furnishes the necessary selection. According to Popper’s picture we have, in sum, a sort of blind and random mechanism: his “trial-and-error” search procedure. Rescher’s opinion about this issue is that, on such Popperian grounds, scientific progress becomes more or less inexplicable. In particular, the success in providing explanatory theories that perform well in prediction and the guidance of applications in a complex world is now an accident of virtually miracolous proportions.

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Organisms and Environments as Combined Systems

Elena Gagliasso (2019)

The present paper aims at exploring the relation between organisms (Life) and environments (Earth), and at showing that nowadays we need new conceptual categories to account for such a relation. Over the last thirty years, indeed, the boundaries of what is meant by “environment” and “organisms” have been transformed, and, more precisely, “Earth” and “Life” must be grasped as a “combined system”. But this dynamic, which does not keep separate the organisms from their life-worlds, it is widely present also at the political and cultural level. So, what is well-known on a scientific level, i.e. that it is the life itself which produces the environment and, at the same time, is subjected to the effects of its modifications on the environment, has to be investigated also at the practical level. Here, a sample of such an investigation will be offered through the analysis of the common mediator of the relationship between Life and Earth, i.e. that metabolic exchange between external and internal bodies that consists of “Food”. Then, some reflections on the current forms of the relationship between environment and “Crime” will be provided and some open questions on the recent concept of “environmental crime” will be raised.