Abstract
Taylor has stated that he concurs with aspects of Deep Ecology through his evaluative and interpretivist framework. I use his work on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s direct coping and perception to explain this affinity with Deep Ecology. This involves exploring the meaning and value provided by nature which involves how we are open to a world which can be explored, learnt and then theorised about.
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Notes
The Enlightenment emphasised a new age of science and technology to overcome myth and superstition - this epoch ushered in the view that humanity could control the natural environment. For environmental purposes, Taylor returns to the work of Hegel’s G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, edited and translated by A. V. Miller (foreword by J. N. Findlay) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970).
J. Baird Callicott, ‘Humes Is/Ought Dichotomy and the Relation of Ecology to Leopold’s Land Ethic’, Environmental Ethics, 4(2) (1982): 163-175.
Aldo Leopold, A Sand Country Almanac (New York: Sierra Club/Ballantine, 1970).
J. Baird Callicott, ‘Rolstrom on Intrinsic Value: A Deconstruction’, Environmental Ethics, 14(2) (1992):129-145.
Charles Taylor, ‘Overcoming Epistomology’. In Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995): 1. Charles Taylor, ‘The Validity of Transcendental Arguments’. In Philosophical Arguments, edited by Charles Taylor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995): 23-25.
Taylor, ‘The Validity of Transcendental Arguments’, 25. And Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, Vol. 79 (1978-79): 153.
Charles Taylor, ‘Overcoming Epistemology’. In Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995): 1.
Charles Taylor, ‘What Is Secularity’. In Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology: Reason, Meaning and Experience, edited by K. Vanhoozer and Martin Warner (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007): 60.
John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994): 85.
Hubert L. Dreyfus, ‘Taylor’s Anti-Realism’. In Charles Taylor, edited by R. Abbey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004): 66. Dreyfus was quoting a private communication with Taylor on anti-epistemology.
John Rundell, ‘Charles Taylor’s Search for Transcendence: Mystery, Suffering, Violence’. In Secularisations and Their Debates, Perspectives on the Return of Religion in the Contemporary West, edited by M. Sharpe and D. Nickelsen (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014).
Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975): 19.
Charles Taylor, ‘Heidegger, Language, and Ecology’. In Heidegger: A Critical Reader, edited by H. L. Dreyfus and H. Hall (Oxford: Blackwells, 1992): 247-269.
Charles Taylor, ‘Recovering the Sacred’, Inquiry 54(2) (2011): 117-118.
Kenneth Baynes, ‘Self, Narrative and Self-Constitution: Revisiting Taylor’s “Self-Interpreting Animals’”, The Philosophical Forum, 41(4) (2010): 441.
Bryan G. Norton, ‘Epistemology and Environmental Values’, The Monist, 75(2) (1992): 224
Callicott’s response to this line of thinking see ‘Was Aldo Leopold a Pragmatist? Rescuing Leopold from the Imagination of Bryan Norton’ (with William Grove-Fanning, Jennifer Rowland, Daniel Baskind, Robert Heath French, and Kerry Walker) Environmental Values 18 (2009): 453-486.
Jim Cheney, ‘Beyond Subjectivism and Objectivism’, TheMonist, 75(2) (1992): 233.
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© 2015 Glen Lehman
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Lehman, G. (2015). Taylor’s Metaphysics, Merleau-Ponty and the Natural Environment. In: Charles Taylor’s Ecological Conversations. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137524782_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137524782_5
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