At the Crossroads

2021 ◽  
pp. 162-180
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Human Intervention ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Species ◽  
Current Crisis ◽  
Global Power

The theme of Chapter 8 encompasses the current crisis and the theory that human dominion is killing the planet and humans with it rather than protecting it. Denial of climate change and the belief that nature needs human intervention to survive instead of the reverse suggest the species is not fit to be the steward of its world. Human beings seem to view the conquest and extirpation of nature as a sort of progressive and inevitable victory over their savage past . . . even though the human species was once in awe of the natural world. These days, the species hominin seems more savagely eager to transform that awe into salable goods and global power. Perhaps the answer to saving the planet is not more sovereignty, but more faith.

Global Justice, Natural Resources, and Climate Change

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Blomfield
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Natural Resources ◽  
Greenhouse Gas ◽  
Global Justice ◽  
Fossil Fuels ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Face ◽  
Human Conflict ◽  
Political Communities

It is commonly recognized that in pursuit of climate justice we must navigate many conflicting claims over natural resources. This has long been obvious in the case of fossil fuels and greenhouse gas sinks including the atmosphere and forests; but it is ever more apparent that responses to climate change also threaten to spur new competition over land and extractive resources. This makes climate change an instance of a broader, more enduring and—for many—all too familiar problem: the problem of human conflict over how the natural world should be cared for, protected, shared, used, and managed. This work develops a new theory of global egalitarianism for natural resources, rejecting both permanent sovereignty and equal division, which is then used to examine the problem of climate change. It formulates principles of resource right designed to protect the ability of all human beings to satisfy their basic needs as members of self-determining political communities, where it is understood that the genuine exercise of collective self-determination is not possible from a position of significant disadvantage in global wealth and power relations. These principles are used to address the question of where to set the ceiling on future greenhouse gas emissions and how to share the resulting emissions budget, in the face of conflicting claims to fossil fuels, climate sinks, and land. It is also used to defend an unorthodox understanding of responsibility for climate change as a problem of global justice, based on its provenance in historical injustice concerning natural resources.

7. Marxism

2020 ◽  
pp. 128-146
Author(s):  
Mark Rupert
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Dialectical Theory ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Global Power ◽  
The Social

This chapter examines Marxist theory’s understanding of capitalism as an historically particular way of organizing social life and how Marxism can shed light on complex social relationships through which human beings produce and reproduce their social relations, the natural world, and themselves. It argues that the kind of social organization envisioned by Marxists has political, cultural, and economic dimensions that must be viewed as a dynamic ensemble of social relations not necessarily contained within the territorial boundaries of nation-states. The chapter first provides an overview of historical materialism and the meaning of dialectical theory, with particular emphasis on Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism and the Marxist tradition’s theorizing of imperialism, before discussing Western Marxism and Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. It then considers Marxist concepts of global power and hegemony and concludes with a case study that highlights the social relations underlying US global militarism.

7. Marxism

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Rupert
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Dialectical Theory ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Global Power ◽  
The Social

This chapter examines Marxist theory's understanding of capitalism as an historically particular way of organizing social life and how Marxism can shed light on complex social relationships through which human beings produce and reproduce their social relations, the natural world, and themselves. It argues that the kind of social organization envisioned by Marxists has political, cultural, and economic dimensions that must be viewed as a dynamic ensemble of social relations not necessarily contained within the territorial boundaries of nation-states. The chapter first provides an overview of historical materialism and the meaning of dialectical theory, with particular emphasis on Karl Marx's critique of capitalism and the Marxist tradition's theorizing of imperialism, before discussing Western Marxism and Antonio Gramsci's theory of hegemony. It then considers Marxist concepts of global power and hegemony and concludes with a case study that highlights the social relations underlying U.S. global militarism.

scholarly journals “I Have This Kind of Grief for the Earth”: A.S. Byatt’s Ecopoetics in Ragnarök, “Thoughts on Myth” and “Sea Story”

2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-67
Author(s):  
Alexandra Cheira
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Human Behaviour ◽  
Environmental Concerns ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Species ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Organic Community ◽  
The Mind

Abstract A.S. Byatt has expressed deep misgivings regarding the role which the human species has played in mis/shaping the natural world due to the wilful blindness which guides human behaviour in this respect. In fact, Byatt has focussed on the destruction of the planet caused by greedy and environmentally-unaware human beings in fictional texts such as Ragnarök: The End of the Gods (2011) or “Sea Story” (2013), as well as in critical pieces such as “Thoughts on Myth” (2011). Hence, I am particularly interested in investigating how Byatt’s texts have been shaped by environmental concerns, as expressed in both her fiction and her critical work. My reading of Byatt’s ecopoetics will therefore be set within the theoretical framework of ecocriticism. Finally, I will also examine Byatt’s argument that in a way her early fictional work was “a questioning quarrel” with her former Cambridge teacher F.R. Leavis’s, whose “vision and values” she nevertheless “inherit[s] and share[s]” (Passions of the Mind, 2) in light of Leavis’s discussion of “the organic community” as proto-ecocritical writing.

Religion in the Age of the Anthropocene

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arianne F. Conty
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Climate Change ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Risks And Benefits ◽  
Human Exceptionalism ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Contemporary Christian ◽  
Genesis 1 ◽  
Forms Of Life

Though responses to the Anthropocene have largely come from the natural and social sciences, religious responses to the Anthropocene have also been gaining momentum and many scholars have been calling for a religious response to complement scientific responses to climate change. Yet because Genesis 1:28 does indeed tell human beings to ‘subdue the earth’ monotheistic religions have often been understood as complicit in the human exceptionalism that is thought to have created the conditions for the Anthropocene. In distinction to such Biblical traditions, indigenous animistic cultures have typically respected all forms of life as ‘persons’ and such traditions have thus become a source of inspiration for ecological movements. After discussing contemporary Christian efforts to integrate the natural sciences and the environment into their responses to the Anthropocene, this article will turn to animism and seek to evaluate the risks and benefits that could ensue from a postmodern form of animism that could provide a necessary postsecular response to the Anthropocene.

Selected Major Issues in Instructional/Communication Technology

1993 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 312-325
Author(s):  
Dilnawaz A. Siddiqui
Keyword(s):  
Instructional Technology ◽  
Fiber Optics ◽  
Communication Technology ◽  
Instructional Communication ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Media Communication ◽  
Satellite Television ◽  
Powerful Learning ◽  
Global Power ◽  
Physical Limitations

Instructional/Communication Technology has come to mean, in a narrowsense, media hardware or a set of tools enabling human beings toovercome their physical limitations. Etymologically, it means one or moretechniques, both concrete and abstract, that help human beings solveproblems. By extension, instructional technology (IT) means all tools atour disposal for facilitating learning. Tickton (1971) defines the purporeof IT as making "education more productive and more individual, to giveinstruction a more scientific base, and to make instruction more powerful,learning more immediate, and access more equal." While the technologyitself might be neutral as a medium and as a means of instructional communication,it is the natw of its use, in terms of timely and appropriatemessages, that is the key to understanding its consequences. It is this finalfactor upon which society needs to focus.The tecent combination of computer, video, fiber optics, satellite television,and other state-of-the-art technologies has enabled a small groupto control the lives of billions. Instructional technology has also Meritedits own share of this instantaneous global power. As a result traditionalboundaries between IT and mass media communication have blurred somuch that IT sounds like a misnomer.It has now become a platitude to say that the nation that controlledthe sealanes in the nineteenth century, or that controlled the airways inthe twentieth century, controlled the whole world. In the twenty-first century,it appears that whoever controls the airwaves will control the worldand whatever is beyond it. Thus the most explosive confluence of ...

A Rapture of the Nerds? A Comparison between Transhumanist Eschatology and Christian Parousia

2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 343-367
Author(s):  
Roberto Paura
Keyword(s):  
Human Brain ◽  
Point Theory ◽  
The Body ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Species ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Universe

Transhumanism is one of the main “ideologies of the future” that has emerged in recent decades. Its program for the enhancement of the human species during this century pursues the ultimate goal of immortality, through the creation of human brain emulations. Therefore, transhumanism offers its fol- lowers an explicit eschatology, a vision of the ultimate future of our civilization that in some cases coincides with the ultimate future of the universe, as in Frank Tipler’s Omega Point theory. The essay aims to analyze the points of comparison and opposition between transhumanist and Christian eschatologies, in particular considering the “incarnationist” view of Parousia. After an introduction concern- ing the problems posed by new scientific and cosmological theories to traditional Christian eschatology, causing the debate between “incarnationists” and “escha- tologists,” the article analyzes the transhumanist idea of mind-uploading through the possibility of making emulations of the human brain and perfect simulations of the reality we live in. In the last section the problems raised by these theories are analyzed from the point of Christian theology, in particular the proposal of a transhuman species through the emulation of the body and mind of human beings. The possibility of a transhumanist eschatology in line with the incarnationist view of Parousia is refused.

The Measure of Greatness

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Social ◽  
Moral Nature ◽  
Complex Trajectory ◽  
The Many ◽  
Human Excellence ◽  
Ethical Perspectives

Magnanimity is a virtue that has led many lives. Foregrounded early on by Plato as the philosophical virtue par excellence, it became one of the crown jewels in Aristotle’s account of human excellence and was accorded an equally salient place by other ancient thinkers. One of the most distinctive elements of the ancient tradition to filter into the medieval Islamic and Christian worlds, it sparked important intellectual engagements there and went on to carve deep tracks through several later philosophies that inherited from this tradition. Under changing names, under reworked forms, it continued to breathe in the thought of Descartes and Hume, Kant and Nietzsche, and their successors. Its many lives have been joined by important continuities. Yet they have also been fragmented by discontinuities—discontinuities reflecting larger shifts in ethical perspectives and competing answers to questions about the nature of the good life, the moral nature of human beings, and their relationship to the social and natural world they inhabit. They have also been punctuated by moments of controversy in which the greatness of this vision of human greatness has itself been called into doubt. This volume provides a window to the complex trajectory of a virtue whose glitter has at times been as heady as it has been divisive. By exploring the many lives it has lived, we will be in a better position to decide whether and why this is a virtue we might still want to make central to our own ethical lives.

Of Two Lives One? Jean-Charles-Marguerite-Guillaume Grimaud and the Question of Holism in Vitalist Medicine

2008 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 593-613 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth A. Williams
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Organism ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Species ◽  
Nervous Systems ◽  
Physiological Processes ◽  
Medical Perspective

ArgumentMontpellier vitalists upheld a medical perspective akin to modern “holism” in positing the functional unity of creatures imbued with life. While early vitalists focused on the human organism, Jean-Charles-Marguerite-Guillaume Grimaud investigated digestion, growth, and other physiological processes that human beings shared with simpler organisms. Eschewing modern investigative methods, Grimaud promoted a medically-grounded “metaphysics.” His influential doctrine of the “two lives” broke with Montpellier holism, classifying some vital phenomena as “higher” and others as “lower” and attributing the “nobility” of the human species to the predominance of the former. In place of Montpellier teaching that attributed health to the holistic equilibration of vital activities, Grimaud embraced spiritualist dualisms of soul and body, Creator and created. Celebrating the divinely-ordained “wisdom” evident in involuntary physiological processes, he argued that such life functions were incomprehensible to human investigators. While Grimaud's work encouraged inquiry into the division between the central and “vegetative” nervous systems that became paradigmatic in nineteenth-century neuroscience, it also opened Montpellier vitalism to charges of conservatism and obscurantism that are still lodged against it to the present day.

Tending this Fragile Earth, Our Island Home: The Pope's Encyclical in Dialogue with Ecomimesis, a Design Model for Conservation Stewardship

2018 ◽  
Vol 100 (4) ◽  
pp. 745-766
Author(s):  
Lillian C. Woo
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Water Pollution ◽  
Anthropogenic Impact ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Design Solution ◽  
World Population ◽  
Natural Ecosystem ◽  
Natural Ecosystems ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World

In the last fifty years, empirical evidence has shown that climate change and environmental degradation are largely the results of increased world population, economic development, and changes in cultural and social norms. Thus far we have been unable to slow or reverse the practices that continue to produce more air and water pollution, soil and ocean degradation, and ecosystem decline. This paper analyzes the negative anthropogenic impact on the ecosystem and proposes a new design solution: ecomimesis, which uses the natural ecosystem as its template to conserve, restore, and improve existing ecosystems. Through its nonintrusive strategies and designs, and its goal of preserving natural ecosystems and the earth, ecomimesis can become an integral part of stabilizing and rehabilitating our natural world at the same time that it addresses the needs of growing economies and populations around the world.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document