Authors:
- This book makes the case that all environmental problems are intimate and relational in origin
- Presents a new perspective that challenges the posthumanist solution to human exceptionalism
- Moves beyond materialism and human/nature dualisms to a close human-nature relational ontology
Part of the book series: AESS Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies and Sciences Series (AESS)
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Table of contents (11 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Understandings of Human-Nature Relationships
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Front Matter
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Dualism and Relational Structure
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Front Matter
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Conclusion
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
About this book
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.Authors and Affiliations
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Department of Natural Resources and the Environment, University of New Hampshire, Durham, USA
Neil H. Kessler
About the author
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Ontology and Closeness in Human-Nature Relationships
Book Subtitle: Beyond Dualisms, Materialism and Posthumanism
Authors: Neil H. Kessler
Series Title: AESS Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies and Sciences Series
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99274-7
Publisher: Springer Cham
eBook Packages: Earth and Environmental Science, Earth and Environmental Science (R0)
Copyright Information: Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-99273-0Published: 20 October 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-07583-5Published: 19 January 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-99274-7Published: 10 October 2018
Series ISSN: 2509-9787
Series E-ISSN: 2509-9795
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XV, 343
Number of Illustrations: 17 b/w illustrations
Topics: Environmental Philosophy, Natural Resources, Environmental and Sustainability Education, Human Geography