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Philosophy, Environment and Technology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 May 2010

David E. Cooper
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Extract

A striking feature of philosophy in the century just passed is the scale of attention paid to questions concerning the natural environment and technology—a scale so large that any brief survey of the development, current state and possible future of such attention would degenerate into telegrammatic reportage. I shall indeed address the question why philosophical concern with environment and technology has ‘taken off’, and with some confidence that its answer will enable a reasonable estimate of the central issues which deserve continuing reflection. But that question, too, is unmanageably large as it stands. So I need to do something to restrict it.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 48 , September 2001 , pp. 141 - 153
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2001

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References

1 Ferré, Frederick, Philosophy of Technology (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1988), p. 9Google Scholar. See also Hare, R. M., ‘Moral reasoning about the environment’, in Almond, B. & Hill, D. (eds), Applied Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1991)Google Scholar, for a similar conception of philosophy's contribution to environmental thinking.

2 Don Ihde, Existential Technics, quoted in Ferré, op. cit., p. 9.

3 A Sand County Almanac, partially reprinted in L. Pojman (ed.), Environmental Ethics: readings in theory and application (Boston: Jones & Bartlett, 1994), pp. 84ff.

4 Both for the charge of ‘eco-fascism’ and the refusal to delete the boundary between sentient and non-sentient nature, see Regan, Tom, The Case for Animal Rights (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).Google Scholar

5 See Serpell, James, In the Company of Animals (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986)Google Scholar, for examples.

6 Anti-Dühring (Moscow. Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1959), pp. 158 & 391.Google Scholar

7 Quoted in Ferré, op. cit., p. 61.

8 Quoted in Levy, Steven, Hackers: Heroes of the computer revolution (New York: Anchor, 1984).Google Scholar

9 See my ‘Technology: liberation or enslavement?’, in Fellows, R. (ed.), Philosophy and Technology (Cambrige: Cambridge University Press, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for discussion of several such controversies.

10 See Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodor, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Allen Lane, 1973).Google Scholar

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12 Most of the best-known figures in contemporary environmental ethics—John Passmore, Arne Naess, and J. Baird Callicott, for example—have addressed these issues. See the selection of readings in Parts II—III of Pojman (ed.), Environmental Ethics, op. cit.

13 Spengler, , Man and Technics: a contribution to the philosophy of life (London: Allen & Unwin, 1932), pp. 76 & 16Google Scholar; Jünger, quoted in Nevin, Thomas, Ernst Jünger and Germany: into the abyss 1914–1945 (London: Constable, 1997), pp. 135 & 140.Google Scholar

14 Carl Schmitt, quoted in Cooper, David E., ‘Reactionary modernism’, in O'Hear, A. (ed.) German Philosophy Since Kant (Cambridge. Cambridge UniversityPress, 1999), p. 292Google Scholar. This article deals, in some detail, with the views of Spengler, Jünger and Heidegger.

15 The Question Concerning Technology (and other essays) (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), pp. 14ff.Google Scholar

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17 Quoted in Linzey, Andrew, Animal Theology (London: SCM Press, 1994), pp. 150–1Google Scholar, and Holland, Alan, ‘Species are dead. Long live genes!’, in Holland, A. and Johnson, A. (eds), Animal Biotechnology and Ethics (London: Chapman & Hall, 1998), p. 236.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18 On the notion of the ‘lived’ body which a person is, see Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981).Google Scholar

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20 Culture and Value (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), 71.Google Scholar