Thinking Through Nature
Jun. 20th, 2008 10:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eve_primeToday I attended part of a conference, Thinking Through Nature: Philosophy for an Endangered World. In the morning, I saw a panel talk by Madronna Holden called "Toward an Environmental Philosophy of Resilience." This was well received. She's a friend/colleague of my friend DO, and I've heard her talk before, on storytelling and health.
Then in the evening, I went to see John Llewellyn, a British continental philosopher who has done a great deal of work on animals and ethics. His keynote talk was called "Barbarism, Humanism and Democratic Ecology," and I'm afraid he spent just over an hour obscurely saying almost nothing, which led to the frustrated audience respectfully but repeatedly asking him to explain further.
The talk had three parts. First, there was a great deal about Luc Ferry considering that animals' suffering can only be analogic to human suffering because animals don't have the same sort of freedom that humans do. (The title of the talk came from a work by Ferry.) Then, we leaped over to ecofeminism - he sees the preference of one type of feminism for singular rather than universal standards to be potentially self-contradictory, but somehow felt that Levinas could help with this. However, his support from Levinas mostly appeared to come from various gender ambiguities in Jewish religious thought.
So finally he leaped into his main point, which he considered a rational trick (and mostly unrelated to anything he had said before). This point is... "The fact that something exists is a good for that thing, and that, in itself, should give us pause." He didn't go into any actual foundation for a relationship between existence and ethics, but he believes that this is sufficient. He said that philosophers have to be willing to sound vacuous, but that in this case he doesn't think this idea is vacuous, but rather, fruitful. I think he could far better have used his time explaining why he finds this idea fruitful. (Or why existence should imply ethics.)
I hope that this talk didn't use up my tolerance for sitting and listening to speakers, because the conference isn't over yet.
Also today: B. went back to Portland after visiting us for six days, and D. and I watched a new Pokémon movie.
Then in the evening, I went to see John Llewellyn, a British continental philosopher who has done a great deal of work on animals and ethics. His keynote talk was called "Barbarism, Humanism and Democratic Ecology," and I'm afraid he spent just over an hour obscurely saying almost nothing, which led to the frustrated audience respectfully but repeatedly asking him to explain further.
The talk had three parts. First, there was a great deal about Luc Ferry considering that animals' suffering can only be analogic to human suffering because animals don't have the same sort of freedom that humans do. (The title of the talk came from a work by Ferry.) Then, we leaped over to ecofeminism - he sees the preference of one type of feminism for singular rather than universal standards to be potentially self-contradictory, but somehow felt that Levinas could help with this. However, his support from Levinas mostly appeared to come from various gender ambiguities in Jewish religious thought.
So finally he leaped into his main point, which he considered a rational trick (and mostly unrelated to anything he had said before). This point is... "The fact that something exists is a good for that thing, and that, in itself, should give us pause." He didn't go into any actual foundation for a relationship between existence and ethics, but he believes that this is sufficient. He said that philosophers have to be willing to sound vacuous, but that in this case he doesn't think this idea is vacuous, but rather, fruitful. I think he could far better have used his time explaining why he finds this idea fruitful. (Or why existence should imply ethics.)
I hope that this talk didn't use up my tolerance for sitting and listening to speakers, because the conference isn't over yet.
Also today: B. went back to Portland after visiting us for six days, and D. and I watched a new Pokémon movie.