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156Biodiversity at Twenty-Five Years: Revolution Or Red Herring?Ethics, Policy and Environment 18 (1): 16-29. 2015.A quarter of a century ago, a group of scientists and conservationists introduced ‘biodiversity’ as a media buzzword with the explicit intent of galvanizing public and political support for environ...
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122Limits of the Flesh: The Role of Reflection in David Abram’s EcophenomenologyEnvironmental Ethics 27 (2): 155-170. 2005.David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human-World convincingly demonstrates the contribution that phenomenology, especially the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, can make to environmental theory. But Abram’s account suffers from several limitations that are explored here. First, although Abram intends to develop an “organic” account of thinking as grounded in the sensible world, his descriptions castigate reflection and reverse, rather than rethinking, the …Read more
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94Singing the world in a new key: Merleau-Ponty and the ontology of senseJanus Head 7 (2): 273-283. 2004.To what extent can meaning be attributed to nature, and what is the relationship between such “natural sense” and the meaning of linguistic and artistic expressions? To shed light on such questions, this essay lays the groundwork for an “ontology of sense” drawing on the insights of phenomenology and Merleau-Ponty’s theory of expression. We argue that the ontological continuity of organic life with the perceived world of nature requires situating sense at a level that is more fundamental than ha…Read more
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74Life beyond BiologismResearch in Phenomenology 40 (2): 243-266. 2010.In a move that has puzzled commentators, Derrida's The Animal that Therefore I Am rejects claims for continuity between the human and the animal, aligning such claims with the ideology of “biologistic continuism.” This problematization of the logic of the human-animal limit holds implications for how we are to understand life in relation to auto-affection, immanence in relation to transcendence, and naturalism in relation to phenomenology. Derrida's abyssal logic parallels the “strange kinship” …Read more
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70Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of NatureNorthwestern University Press. 2009.In our time, Ted Toadvine observes, the philosophical question of nature is almost entirely forgotten—obscured in part by a myopic focus on solving "environmental problems" without asking how these problems are framed. But an "environmental crisis," existing as it does in the human world of value and significance, is at heart a philosophical crisis. In this book, Toadvine demonstrates how Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology has a special power to address such a crisis—a philosophical power far…Read more
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59The Elemental PastResearch in Phenomenology 44 (2): 262-279. 2014.In a 1951 debate that marked the beginnings of the analytic-continental divide, Maurice Merleau-Ponty sided with Georges Bataille in rejecting A. J. Ayer’s claim that “the sun existed before human beings.” This rejection is already anticipated in a controversial passage from Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, where he claims that “there is no world without an Existence that bears its structure.” I defend Merleau-Ponty’s counterintuitive position against naturalistic and anti-subjectivi…Read more
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57Phenomenological method in Merleau-ponty's critique of GurwitschHusserl Studies 17 (3): 195-205. 2001.
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42Riassunto: La melodia della vita e il motivo della filosofiaChiasmi International 7 279-279. 2005.
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40Gestalts and RefrainsEnvironmental Philosophy 2 (2): 61-71. 2005.Western philosophy and culture have often posited a structural homology between music and nature. In a contemporary version of this association, deep ecologist Arne Naess proposes that the basic units of reality are hierarchically nested gestalts of a fundamentally relational character. I argue that Naess’s gestalt model fails to account for non-holistic or non-sensical experiences and for creative change in nature. I then suggest the concept of the “refrain”developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix…Read more
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40Eco-Phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself (edited book)State University of New York Press. 2003.Explores how continental philosophy can inform environmental ethics
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27Our Monstrous FuturesSymposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy/Revue canadienne de philosophie continentale 21 (1): 219-230. 2017.Apocalyptic fictions abound in contemporary culture, multiplying end-of-the-world fantasies of environmental collapse. Meanwhile, efforts toward global sustainability extrapolate from deep-past trends to predict and manage deep-future scenarios. These narratives converge in “eco-eschatologies,” which work as phantasms that construct our identities, our understanding of the world, and our sense of responsibility in the present. I critique ecoeschatology’s reliance on an interpretation of deep tim…Read more
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26Résumé: La mélodie de la vie et Ie motif de la philosophieChiasmi International 7 279-279. 2005.
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25How Not to be a JellyfishIn Christian Lotz & Corinne Painter (eds.), Phenomenology and the Non-Human Animal, Springer. pp. 39--55. 2007.
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22Le temps des voix animalesChiasmi International 15 269-282. 2013.Phenomenology’s attention to the theme of animality has focused not on animal life in general but rather on the animal dimension of the human and its contested relation with humanity as such. Phenomenology thereby reproduces Agamben’s “anthropological machine” by which humanity is constructed through the “inclusive exclusion” of its animality. The alternative to this “inclusive exclusion” is not, however, a return to kinship or commonality but rather an intensification of the constitutive parado…Read more
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22Absolution of Finitude in Hegel’s Phenomenology of SpiritSouthwest Philosophy Review 12 (2): 141-156. 1996.
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21The Merleau-Ponty Reader (edited book)Northwestern University Press. 2007.The first reader to offer a comprehensive view of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work, this selection collects in one volume the foundational essays necessary for understanding the core of this critical twentieth-century philosopher’s thought. Arranged chronologically, the essays are grouped in three sections corresponding to the major periods of Merleau-Ponty’s work: First, the years prior to his appointment to the Sorbonne in 1949, the early, existentialist period during which he wrote important work…Read more
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21Introduction: “Continental philosophy: What and where will it be?”Southern Journal of Philosophy 50 (2): 171-179. 2012.
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