Abstract
The dominant current in the contemporary environmental movement fails to make the connection between the preservation of the environment and the survival of humans. The fashionable concept of the “Anthropocene” is not fully adequate to get to grips with the full gravity of the situation. Contemporary human society, based on a neo-liberal market economy, is “locked in” to a productivist mode of existence, so that it will be extremely difficult to abandon the goal of “growth” and to achieve a sustainable relationship with the eco-system on which human existence depends. The “TAC” thesis, that “Technology is Anthropologically Constitutive,” has a dark side: technology may be anthropologically destructive.
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Notes
- 1.
The COP21 conference was held in Paris from 30 November to 12 December 2015; it lead to an agreement between the 195 States involved to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases. This so-called “Paris agreement” came into effect on 4 November 2016.
- 2.
Even in the case of humans, collective intelligence may well be greater than the intelligence of individuals, as in the case of Condorcet’s jury theorem. But this is not systematically so; and in the present case an argument can be made that the collective intelligence is indeed less than that of the individuals.
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Stewart, J. (2018). The Anthropocene: Where Are We Going?. In: Loeve, S., Guchet, X., Bensaude Vincent, B. (eds) French Philosophy of Technology. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 29. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89518-5_14
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