Ardea: A Philosophical Novella

What is soul? Can it be forfeited? Can it be traded away? If it can, what would ensue? What consequences would follow from loss of soul — for the individual, for society, for the earth? In the early nineteenth century, Goethe’s hero, Faust, became a defining archetype of modernity, a harbinger of the existential possibilities and moral complexities of the modern condition. But today the dire consequences of the Faustian pact with the devil are becoming alarmingly visible. In light of this, how would Goethe’s arguably flawed drama play out in a 21st-century century setting? Would a contemporary Faust sign up to a demonic deal? Indeed what, in the wake of two hundred years of social and economic development, would be left for the devil to offer him? A contemporary Faust would already possess everything the original Faust in his ascetic cloister lacked — affluence and mobility; celebrity and worldly influence; access to information; religious choice; sexual freedom and the availability of women — though women, it must be noted, currently also partake of that same freedom. The only thing a present-day Faust would lack would be his soul. Would he miss it? Does soul even exist? If it does, it would of course be the one thing the devil could not bestow. So from what or whom could Faust retrieve it? What, in a word, would a contemporary Faust most deeply desire? In pursuit of these questions, Ardea engages a familiar but possibly faulty archetype, that of Faust, with an unfamiliar one, that of the white heron, borrowed from a short story of the same name by nineteenth-century American author, Sarah Orne Jewett. In Jewett’s tale, a soul-pact of an entirely different kind from that entered into by Faust is proposed. It is a pact with the wild, a pledge of fealty, of non-forfeiture, that promises to redraw the violent psycho-sexual and psycho-spiritual patterns that have underpinned modernity. How would a present-day heir to the Faustian tradition, ingrained with the habit of entitlement but also burdened with the consequences of the old pact, respond to the new proposition

Bioproportionality: a necessary norm for conservation?

In the early stages of the environment movement, one of the principal objects of conservation was wilderness. In the 1980s, the category of wilderness gave way to that of biodiversity: conservation was reconceived as biodiversity conservation. With this change of categories, the focus of conservation shifted from the saving of vast and abundant terrains of life to the saving of types of living thing, particularly species. A little-noted consequence of this reframing was a reduction in scale: minimum viable populations of species, which set targets under the new biodiversity-based conception of conservation, were often orders of magnitude lower than the populations that might have occurred in wilderness areas. Exclusive focus on the value of diversity thus tended to lead conservationists to lose sight of the value of abundance. To correct this disastrous miscarriage of environmental intentions, a new complementary category is here proposed: bioproportionality. It is not enough to conserve minimum viable populations of all species. The aim should be to optimize such populations. Optimized targets will be estimated by reference to the principle of bioproportionality: the population of each species should be as abundant as is consistent with an ecologically proportionate abundance of adjoining populations of other species. Applied to the human population, this principle will require a dramatic reduction

Conversation amongst Rocks with Sun Dew

Sun Dew and Rosmarin meet to discuss how ecological coherence is the condition for the experiences of eternity, meaning and belonging that underlie the religious quest across cultures and traditions

Living Waters Inquiry

What would it be like to live in a world of sentient beings rather than inert objects? How would we relate to such a world? And if we invoke such a world of sentient presence, calling to more than human beings as persons, might we elicit a response?’ These key questions inform the ‘Living Waters’ inquiry, in which co-inquirers participate in communicative ways with their rivers or wetlands. In this presentation, we provide ‘tasters’ of the ‘Living Waters Inquiry’. We sample panpsychism as a philosophical approach to living places; overview Cooperative Inquiry, meet Gaia thinking and practice; and offer examples of co-researchers hearing places. Please be ready with your questions after the presentation

Unity between God and mind? A study on the relationship between panpsychism and pantheism

The author thanks the John Templeton Foundation and The Pantheism and Panentheism Project for sponsoring this paperA number of contemporary philosophers have suggested that the recent revival of interest in panpsychism within philosophy of mind could reinvigorate a pantheistic philosophy of religion. This project explores whether the combination and individuation problems, which have dominated recent scholarship within panpsychism, can aid the pantheist’s articulation a God/Universe Unity. Constitutive holistic panpsychism is seen to be the only type of panpsychism suited to aid pantheism in articulating this type of unity. There are currently no well-developed solutions to the individuation problem for this type of panpsychism. Moreover, the gestures towards a solution appear costly to the religious significance of pantheism. This article concludes that any hope that the contemporary panpsychism might aid pantheists in articulating Unity is premature and possibly misplaced.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Living With Animals

\u27Without animals,\u27 says Peter, a Maasai nomad interviewed in the New Internationalist1, \u27life isn\u27t worth living\u27. Sitting here in my inner-city backyard writing this, with a circle of attentive little upturned canine and feline faces surrounding me, and my cranky duck tugging at my shoelaces, I could not be in more heartfelt agreement. But how many people today would share this sentiment? For how many would it be football that makes life worth living, or cars, or opera, or ice-skating? Is there anything to ground the conviction that I want to defend here, that the company of non-human animals is a necessary part of human life, in a way that football, cars, opera and ice-skating manifestly are not, and that we relinquish or forego it at our peril

Ecophilosophy as a Way of Life

The contemporary figure of the ecophilosopher perhaps holds the seeds of something that transcends philosophy in its current strictly academic, professionalized, indeed corporatized mode. This is a "something" that could, on the one hand, tie philosophy back to its own ancient, life-giving, but now lost, root in the Graeco-Roman world, and on the other hand, open it up to people searching outside the academy for a shared and reflective way of life that is authentically Earth-aligned. By means of a detailed comparison of ecophilosophy with the ancient schools of Stoicism and Epicureanism, understood not merely as intellectual discourses but as "ways of life" (Pierre Hadot), I argue that the figure of the ecophilosopher potentially offers to thoughtful people everywhere a radical pathway through the illusions of our current period of decline-and-fall towards a more adaptive life grounded in "direct, unmediated contact with the real.