Environmentality: Being Ecological in Philosophy, Criticism, and Ethics

Catalog description

This seminar considers the transformative ingress of ecological concerns into a number of fields, from philosophy and deconstruction to anthropology and literary studies. While acknowledging the unprecedented events - e.g., anthropogenic global warming-that have precipitated this eco-turn, our course will also sample millenary pre-history of environmental philosophy in the West and place it into dialogue with ecological thought and ethics from Caribbean and other non-Western, especially American indigenous culture. Our trajectory is threefold: we will study philosophical, literary, and scientific conceptions of nature, nonhuman beings, and human-nonhumans relations; we will grapple with the how to articulate the ontology and phenomenology of the environmental conditions; and we will investigate a handful of subfields of ecocriticism (such as animal studies, plant studies, and cold studies).