philosophy

Through speculative, poetic, and provocative texts, thirteen writers and artists have come together to reflect on human relationships with other species and the planet.

Object Oriented Environs takes its cue from the philosophical movement Object-Oriented Ontology in the hope of provoking a conversation about how early modernists, or humanists in general, parse the question of matter, of things. This collection emerged from a session of the Shakespeare Association of America meeting in 2014.

The authors put forward the idea of “speculative geology” to explain the violence inherent in volcanism, drawing on three volcanic episodes and the more recent unexpected striking of magma in Iceland’s Krafla volcanic caldera.

The authors introduce a special section of Environmental Humanities on manifestations of deep time through places, objects, and practices, focusing on three modes through which it is encountered: enchantment, violence, and haunting.

In the context of current concerns within the environmental humanities to challenge the idea that humans are somehow irreducible to nature, the authors in this article take up the much-neglected history of the idea of human exceptionality itself, arguing that this form of humanist discourse often forgets its own contingencies and instabilities, and its comprehensively violent inheritances.

Greaves responds to J. Baird Callicott’s “A NeoPresocratic Manifesto” with an alterative conception of the project of the Presocratics, inspired by the Heraclitean notion of unity in oppostion.

Vital Reenchantments takes up E. O. Wilson’s Biophilia (1984), James Lovelock’s Gaia (1979), and Carl Sagan’s Cosmos (1980), to show how each work fleshes out scientific concepts with attention to “affective wonder.”

Contributing authors examine what happens when we cease to assume that only humans exert agency, by considering animals and vegetables as agents rather than mere objects.

Adrian Ivakhiv proposes an ecological realism based on humanity’s eventual demise, asking what we can do now and what quality of compost we should leave behind.