Analyzes the relationship between humanity and the natural world from the point of view of philosophy and examines the dehumanization of nature in Western civilization The quest of this volume is one of recalling what we have thus hidden ...

What is the epistemological status of a world within which speaking to trees would appear as an appropriate behavior? It would be a world perceived as a community of autonomous beings worthy of respect. Such a world contrasts with the anthropocentric conception of the world as a value?free reservoir of raw materials, but neither worldview can or should claim descriptive accuracy. Both are equally ?manners of speaking? and the choice between them must rest on whether they are conducive to ecologically (...) constructive or ecologically destructive behavior. On that basis, speaking to trees is a legitimate, speaking of biomechanisms an illegitimate form of verbal behavior. (shrink)

I draw on the resources of Husserlian phenomenology to argue that the way humans constitute nature as a meaningful whole by their purposive presence as hunter/gatherers (nature as mysterium tremendum), as herdsmen/farmers (nature as partner), and as producer/consumers (nature as resource) affects the way they respond to its distress—as to a resource failure, as a to flawed relationship, or asto a fate from which “only a god could save us.” I find all three responses wanting and look to a different (...) experience, that of nature as an endangered species, as the ground for a more adequate response of accepting responsibility for our freedom, with the consequence of imposing ethical limits on the way that humans relate to all being, not to humans alone. (shrink)

Doom and Democracy: An Essay in Political Soteriology The essay explores the philosophical (metatheoretical) presuppositions of democratic social strategy in the current "apocalyptic age". Here democracy means a way of life based on the assumption that individual freedom, mutual respect and fundamental good will toward the other can be taken for granted; as a feasible and a desirable way of ordering human affairs. In this broadly cultural sense, democracy is an outgrowth of a deeply rooted consensus on the posture of (...) respect and good will toward all. Yet democracy, with its Enlightenment heritage of sober rationality, seems ill-equipped for dealing with apocalyptic threats. That what makes our age apocalyptic is truth denied. The arrogant posture of omnipotence leads to paralysis. A democratic strategy needs to be one that has the courage to face the truth and the commitment to deal heart and will with the finite tasks we recognise once we give up the arrogance of infinite ones. (shrink)

The idea of the book is brilliant in its simplicity: to superimpose Husserl's several introductions to phenomenology and so to construct a composite image of what Husserl assumed about his enterprise--though he may not have articulated it adequately in any one of his introductions. The author should not be faulted that, like others before him, he actually ends up following the introduction from the Ideen cycle, with references to those in Cartesian Meditations and Crisis. The introduction in Ideen I is (...) clearly central and most systematic. If he is to be faulted at all, it would be because, like others before him, he focuses on the introduction in the Ideen cycle but largely ignores the crucial second volume, Phänomenologische Studien zur Konstitution, though more of that anon. (shrink)

[Some Notes on the Meaning of Dialogue.].

[Original Czech work on inter-human ethics].

[Notes on the Discussion of the “Spiritual Dimension of the Environment“].

[The curious friendship of positivism and phenomenology. in Czech thought].

[An Understanding Heart: Rationality, Value. and Transcendental Phenomenology].

THE PURPOSE of this paper is to sketch in a missing chapter in the near-history of Western philosophy, tracing the fortunes of one of Husserl's unfinished projects--that of securing an experiential foundation for transcendental philosophy in the "natural" world of our lives--at the hands of one of the most critical yet doggedly faithful students of his closing years, the Czech philosopher Jan Patocka.