Everyday limits to adaptation

Adaptation to climate change, in terms of both academic and policy debates, has been treated predominantly as a local issue. This scalar focus points towards local agency as well as the contested responsibilisation of local actors and potential disconnects with higher-level dynamics. While there are growing calls for individuals to take charge of their own lives against mounting climatic forces, little is known about the day-to-day actions people take, the many hurdles, barriers, and limits they encounter in their adaptation choices, and the trade-offs they consider envisaging the future. To address this gap, this article draws on 80+ interviews with urban and rural residents in Western Australia to offer a nuanced analysis of everyday climate adaptation and its limits. Our findings demonstrate that participants are facing significant adaptation barriers and that, for many, these barriers already constitute limits to what they can do to protect what they value most. They also make visible how gender, age, and socioeconomic status shape individual preferences, choices, and impediments, revealing compounding layers of disadvantage and differential vulnerability. We argue that slow and reflexive research is needed to understand what adaptation limits matter and to whom and identify opportunities to harness and support local action. Only then will we be able to surmount preconceived neoliberal ideals of the self-sufficient, resilient subject, engage meaningfully with ontological pluralism, and contribute to the re-politicisation of adaptation decision making.

Critical Naturalism

In this paper I map the conceptual framework of naturalism, its ontological implications and its current projection in the field of neurophilosophy. I show how critical naturalism formally differs from radical ontological naturalisms, both global and sectoral, in order to become a critical instance. Its theoretical implications lead to a definition of natural causality from the emergentist perspective and to metaphysical scenarios ranging from ontological pluralism to noumenal monism.

The Metaphysics of Theism: A Classical and Neo-Classical Synthesis

This article aims to provide a metaphysical elucidation of the notion of Theism and a coherent theological synthesis of two extensions of this notion: Classical Theism and Neo-Classical Theism. A model of this notion and its extensions is formulated within the ontological pluralism framework of Kris McDaniel and Jason Turner, and the (modified) modal realism framework of David Lewis, which enables it to be explicated clearly and consistently, and two often raised objections against the elements of this notion can be successfully answered.

Does Aristotle’s ‘Being Is Not a Genus’ Argument Entail Ontological Pluralism?

This paper differentiates between two readings of Aristotle’s argument that unity and being are not “genē” (UBANG for short). On the first reading – proposed by commentators such as Ackrill, Shields, Loux, and McDaniel – UBANG entails the proposition that there are no features that characterise all beings insofar as they are, referred to by its contemporary proponents, including McDaniel, as ‘ontological pluralism’. On the second reading – proposed here – UBANG does not entail this proposition. The paper argues that only on the second reading does Aristotle’s argument secure its conclusion, that the second reading is, in fact, the correct reading of UBANG, and that anyone who thinks that UBANG succeeds and entails ontological pluralism probably equivocates between two different senses of ‘genos’.

Ontological Pluralism and Multi-Quantificational Ontology

This paper explores some variants and aspects of multi-quantificational criteria of existence, examining these in the context of the debate between monism and pluralism in analytical philosophy. Assuming familiarity with the findings to date (summarized in broad terms at the outset), we seek to apply to these the newly introduced concepts of “substitution” and “substitutional model”. Possible applications of formal theories involving multiple types of existential quantifier are highlighted, together with their methods of construction. These considerations then lead to a thesis asserting the irrelevance of both multi-quantificational criteria and assumptions involving quantificational ontology to the debate between monism and pluralism in ontology. Many quantifiers cannot properly distinguish different modes of existence–as we aim to show by furnishing a general method for constructing counter-examples to any theory that assumes that different types of existential quantifier correspond to different modes of existence.

Alternative Global Governances

Global governance has become part of the international relations vocabulary. As an analytical category and as a political project it is a strong tool that illustrates the major complexities of world politics in contexts of globalization. The study of global governance has expanded and superseded traditional approaches to international relations that focus on relations among states. Moreover, the study of global governance and has included nonstate actors and their dynamics into a more intricate thematic agenda of global politics. However, global governance has become less a political space of deliberation and more of a managerial aspect of world politics because of some assumptions about reality, humanity, and the international community. It would appear that this is a result of the predominance of liberal thought in world politics after the end of the Cold War. Regardless of how diverse the approaches to global governance may appear, the ontological assumptions—that is, the beliefs about reality that are behind its definition, conceptualization, and implementation as political projects—are not neutral nor are they universal. These assumptions respond to specific appreciations of reality and are inherited from Western modernity. The problem with this is that claims to contemplate the interests of humanity as a whole abound in global governance institutions and arrangements, whereas in fact global governance is constructed by neglecting other possible realities about the world. The consequences of this conceptualization are important in the sense that global governance becomes a tool of exclusion. Only by taking into consideration the ontological difference through which global governance can reflect the complexities of a diverse world can one explore the importance of alternative governances as a way to consider how global orders can be approached. Such alternative global governances draw from ontological pluralism and conceive political global orders as based on the coexistence and negotiation of different realities.

Finding shared meaning in the Anthropocene: engaging diverse perspectives on climate change

The scientific evidence of climate change has never been clearer and more convergent, and calls for transformations to sustainability have never been greater. Yet, perspectives and social opinions about it remain fractured, and collaborative action is faltering. Climate policy seeks to forge a singular sense of climate change, dominated by an ‘information deficit model’ that focuses on transferring climate science to the lay public. Critics argue that this leaves out certain perspectives, including the plurality of meanings uncovered through participatory approaches. However, questions remain about how these approaches can better account for nuances in the psychological complexity of climate change, without getting stuck in the cul-de-sacs of epistemological relativism and post-truth politics. In this paper, I explore an approach through which we might find shared meaning at the interface of individual and collective views about climate change. I first present a conceptual framework that describes five psychological reasons why climate change challenges individual and collective meaning-making, and also provides a way to understand how meaning is organized within that. I then use this framework to inform the use of photo voice as a transformative (action-research) method, examining its ability to overcome some of the meaning-making challenges specific to climate change. I discuss how participants from a coffee cooperative in Guatemala reflected first on their own climate meanings and then engaged in a meaning-making process with other actors in the coffee value chain. Findings suggest a psychosocial approach to climate engagement—one that engages both subjectively and intersubjectively on the complexities unique to climate change—is helpful in acknowledging an ontological pluralism of ‘climate changes’ amongst individuals, while also supporting a nexus-agreement collectively. This may in turn contribute to a more effective and ethical process of transformation.

Environmental governance: Broadening ontological spaces for a more livable world

This paper contributes to global debates on environmental governance by drawing on recent ontological scholarship to ask: What would it mean to ontologically engage the concept of environmental governance? By examining the ontological underpinnings of three environmental governance domains (land, water, biodiversity), we find that dominant contemporary environmental governance concepts and policy instruments are grounded in a modernist ontology which actively shapes the world, making certain aspects and relationships visible while invisibilizing others. We then survey ethnographic and other literature to highlight how such categories and their relations have been conceived otherwise and the implications of breaking out of a modernist ontology for environmental governance. Lastly, we argue that answering our opening question requires confronting the coloniality woven into the environmental governance project and consider how to instead embrace ontological pluralism in practice. In particular, we examine what taking seriously the right to self-determination enshrined in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) could mean for acknowledging Indigenous ontologies as systems of governance in their own right; what challenges and opportunities exist for recognizing and translating ontologies across socio-legal regimes; and how embracing the dynamism and hybridity of ontologies might complicate or advance struggles for material and cognitive justice.

Ontological Pluralism about Non-Being

Ontological pluralism is the view that there is more than one fundamental way of being. This paper sketches ontological pluralism about non-being, the idea that non-being can be further divided into more fundamental categories. After drawing out the relationship between pluralism about being and pluralism about non-being, I discuss quantificational strategies for the pluralist about non-being. I examine historical precedent for the view. Finally, I suggest that pluralism about non-being has explanatory power across a variety of domains, and that the view can account for differences between non-existent past and future times, between omissions and absences, and between different kinds of fictional objects.

The Next Generation of International Law: Space, Ice, and the Cosmolegal Proposal

With the increasing environmental degradation in spaces most affected by climate change such as the Arctic, and the extension of anthropogenic environmental problems even into the Earth’s orbit, international law is confronted with some unprecedented challenges. Much of the legal dialogue surrounding this question is taking place in the abstract, such that there are no exact proposals for methodological and practical applications in lawmaking. In this Article, I argue that current governance relevant to the Arctic and outer space precedes an understanding of these spaces. Critical posthumanism, and other approaches, point out the continuation of strict boundaries that have been set up between the human body and the environment. International law’s formalist doctrinal deductions exacerbate these boundaries. I propose an approach to lawmaking under a broad term: the cosmolegal. The cosmolegal proposal challenges distinctions between human-made and non-human “laws”—scientific and social laws—and questions the foundational determination of both. The framework I suggest in this Article, therefore, requires a new approximation to accuracy in lawmaking, which could be achieved by greater interdisciplinarity and acceptance of ontological pluralism. This Article is divided into two broader sections. The first section focuses on two environmental problems: A) greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the Arctic and B) orbital debris. The second section argues for a different ontology of law and human self-understanding in the context of the unknown. It proposes “cosmolegality” in an attempt to approximate the inclusion and representation of ‘everything considered to be non-human.