Ontology And Closeness In Human Nature Relationships

In Ontology and Closeness in Human-Nature Relationships, Neil H. Kessler identifies the preconceptions which can keep the modern human mind in the dark about what is happening relationally between humans and the more-than-human world. He has written an accessible work of environmental philosophy, with a focus on the ontology of human-nature relationships. In it, he contends that large-scale environmental problems are intimate and relational in origin. He also challenges the deeply embedded, modernist assumptions about the relational limitations of more-than-human beings, ones which place erroneous limitations on the possibilities for human/more-than-human closeness. Diverging from the posthumanist literature and its frequent reliance on new materialist ontology, the arguments in the book attempt to sweep away what ecofeminists call “human/nature dualisms. In doing so, conceptual avenues open up that have the power to radically alter how we engage in our daily interactions with the more-than-human world all around us. Given the diversity of fields and disciplines focused on the human-nature relationship, the topics of this book vary quite broadly, but always converge at the nexus of what is possible between humans and more-than-human beings. The discussion interweaves the influence of human/nature dualisms with the limitations of Deleuzian becoming and posthumanism’s new materialism and agential realism. It leverages interhuman interdependence theory, Charles Peirce’s synechism of feeling and various treatments of Theory of Mind while exploring the influence of human/nature dualisms on sustainability, place attachment, common worlds pedagogy, emergence, and critical animal studies. It also explores the implications of plant electrical activity, plant intelligence, and plant “neurobiology” for possibilities of relational capacities in plants while even grappling with theories of animism to challenge the animate/inanimate divide. The result is an engaging, novel treatment of human-nature relational ontology that will encourage the reader to look at the world in a whole new way.

The 21st century is on the verge of a possible total economic and political revolution. Technological advances in robotics, computing and digital communications have the potential to completely transform how people live and work. Even more radically, humans will soon be interacting with artificial intelligence (A.I.) as a normal and essential part of their daily existence. What is needed now more than ever is to rethink social relations to meet the challenges of this soon-to-arrive "smart" world. This book proposes an original theory of trans-human relations for this coming future. Drawing on insights from organisational studies, critical theory, psychology and futurism - it will chart for readers the coming changes to identity, institutions and governance in a world populated by intelligent human and non-human actors alike. It will be characterised by a fresh emphasis on infusing programming with values of social justice, protecting the rights and views of all forms of "consciousness" and creating the structures and practices necessary for encouraging a culture of "mutual intelligent design". To do so means moving beyond our anthropocentric worldview of today and expanding our assumptions about the state of tomorrow's politics, institutions, laws and even everyday existence. Critically such a profound shift demands transcending humanist paradigms of a world created for and by humans and instead opening ourselves to a new reality where non-human intelligence and cyborgs are increasingly central.

This book is a genealogical foregrounding and performance of conceptions of children and their childhoods over time. We acknowledge that children’s lives are embedded in worlds both inside and outside of structured schooling or institutional settings, and that this relationality informs how we think about what it means to be a child living and experiencing childhood. The book maps the field by taking up a cross-disciplinary, genealogical niche to offer both an introduction to theoretical underpinnings of emerging theories and concepts, and to provide hands-on examples of how they might play out. This book positions children and their everyday lived childhoods in the Anthropocene and focuses on the interface of children’s being in the everyday spaces and places of contemporary communities and societies. In particular this book examines how the shift towards posthuman and new materialist perspectives continues to challenge dominant developmental, social constructivist and structuralist theoretical approaches in diverse ways, to help us to understand contemporary constructions of childhoods. It recognises that while such dominant approaches have long been shown to limit the complexity of what it means to be a child living in the contemporary world, the traditions of many Eurocentric theories have not addressed the diversity of children’s lives in the majority of countries or in the Global South.

This book engages with the changing ways in which we, as a society and culture, look upon and interact with animals, stressing how much animals differ among themselves. An invitation to appreciate the peculiar role of animals in telling important if uncomfortable truths about who we are and where we are heading – namely, towards a world so much poorer in cultural, moral, and biological diversity – as a result of the ongoing decimation of so many other species. Drawing on a variety of thought ranging from that of Midgley, Plumwood, and Murdoch to Levinas, Derrida, and Habermas, from ecophilosophers to conservation biologists, Animal Lives and Why They Matter asks how we have come to this, and what an alternative, less destructive approach to our now precarious coexistence with animals might look like. Spanning the disciplines of philosophy, psychology, and anthropology, this enquiry into various cross-species relationships and encounters will appeal to scholars and students across the humanities and social sciences with interests in philosophy, ethics, human-animal interaction, and environmental thought.

Many descriptions of empathy revolve around sharing in and understanding another person’s emotions. One separate person gains access to the emotional world of another. An entire worldview holds up this idea. It is individualistic and affirms the possibility of access to other people’s “inner world.” Can we really see inside another, though? And are we discrete, separate selves? How can we best grapple with these questions in the field of music therapy? In response, this book offers four empathy pathways. Two are situated in a constituent approach (that prioritises discrete individuals who then enter into relationships with one another) and two are located in relational approaches (that acknowledge the foundational reality of relationships themselves). By understanding empathy more fully, music therapists, teachers and researchers can engage in ways that are congruent with diverse worldviews and ways of being. Examples used in the book are from active and receptive music therapy approaches as well as from community and clinical contexts, so as to provide clear links to practice. This book will be a valuable resource for academics and postgraduate students within music therapy and allied fields including art therapy, drama therapy, dance/movement therapy, psychology, counselling, occupational therapy and social development studies.

Many life scientists implicitly assume a materialistic metaphysics that is based on the worldview of the 19th century. This sort of reductionistic metaphysics does not do justice to the complexity of biological phenomena, leaving many features of living processes unexplained. The authors of this book explore the viability of process metaphysics to advance our understanding of fundamental biological concepts such as organism, ontogeny, agency, teleology, environment, and normativity. Based on the metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead and other process thinkers, the authors ascribe subjective interiority to all living beings, from unicellular organisms to the most complex animals. This book highlights the uniqueness and intrinsic value of living beings. It presents a new approach to essential dimensions of the phenomenon of life with the aim of opening up new horizons in the thinking of philosophers, philosophers of biology, life scientists, and environmentalists.

This book is a rhizomatic curriculum autobiography that charts the author’s efforts to develop and promote Australian outdoor environmental education practices that are inclusive of, and responsive to, the places in which they are performed. Joining philosophical concepts created by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari with William Pinar’s autobiographical method for curriculum inquiry, the author (re)considers the interrelated concepts, contexts and complex conversations with colleagues, students and others that have shaped his approach to curriculum, pedagogy and research for fifteen years or more. Emphasising the complexity of developing curricula and pedagogies that engage, in a respectful and generative way, with the natural and cultural history of the Australian continent, the author explicates and enacts his attempts to think differently about the cultural, curricular and pedagogical understandings that inform the practices of Australian outdoor environmental educators. Outdoor environmental education in Australia has historically been influenced by imported universalist ideas, particularly from the USA and the UK. However, during the last two decades a growing number of researchers in this field have challenged the applicability of such taken-for-granted approaches and advocated the development of curricula and pedagogies informed by the unique bio-geographical and cultural histories of the locations in which educational experiences take place. As this book demonstrates, Alistair Stewart is prominent among the vanguard of Australian outdoor environmental educators who have led such advocacy by combining practical experience with theoretical rigour.

This edited collection builds on recent strands in philosophy that promote a critical conceptual return to the material world outside human culture. Through the lens of literary analysis and theory, it conceptualizes the potential of New Materialism as a timely mode of critique toward the current human condition and its effect on literature and the present. Organized around the key New Materialist concepts of entanglement and speculation, the chapters by renowned literary scholars and theorists approach literary texts and theory from onto-epistemological and speculative realist perspectives. Both concepts critically bespeak our precarious relation to matter during the Anthropocene. Entanglement analyzes this human inference with the material environment and its consequences, while speculation makes palpable our cognitive limits in grasping these consequences and our continued obligation to try to do so. Literature emerges as a site where entanglement and speculation, as well as their alignment, are intensively presented and negotiated. In highlighting these connections, the chapters in this collection bring entanglement and speculation (theory) together to form a critical literary theory fit for the Anthropocene.