Agnese Di Riccio

The challenge of articulating the society-nature interface in the context of the ecological crisis has been at the center of recent debates in environmental philosophy. While some insist on the necessity to develop robust ways of talking about natural processes as distinct from society, others propose to abandon the nature-society distinction as outdated. In this article, I argue that a critical-realist assessment of nature is a necessary starting point for post-capitalist ecopolitics. To prove this, I focus on Cornelius Castoriadis’s reflections on nature and material imagination, which have been overlooked in existing literature on this topic. At first, I offer an overview of current debates on the nature-society divide and argue that abandoning this distinction generates theoretical and political impasses. I then argue that Castoriadis’s account of biophysical processes as dynamic and self-determining provides an original critical-naturalist framework, which presents geophysical and biological phenomena as connected yet irreducible to the normativity of the social. Finally, I explore how this approach can direct ecopolitical projects, moving beyond Castoriadis’s narrow definition of degrowth and toward practices of commoning. I contend that different ways of sharing resources, infrastructures, and space disclose alternative ways of integrating the creativity of social imagination with the creativity of nature and thus reshaping the society-nature interface in the Anthropocene.

This paper assesses Hegel’s theory of cognition within the context of the (non-)conceptualism debate, originally sparked by John McDowell’s engagement with Hegel and recently extended to his Philosophy of Subjective Spirit. Rather than aligning with either conceptualism or non-conceptualism, we argue that Hegel’s conception of cognition challenges both positions. In §1, we reconstruct the (non-)conceptualist debate as it relates to Hegel. We then show that both approaches assign a paradigmatic role to sensation, the initial stage of Hegel’s Anthropology, and thereby risk offering a distorting picture of the role of the Psychology: in §2, we critique non-conceptualist readings for treating sensation as an isolated and self-sufficient level of cognition; in §3 we argue that conceptualist readings elevate sensation to a transcendental precondition for the understanding of higher cognitive functions. In the final section (§4), we turn to ‘intuition’ (Anschauung), the first stage of Theoretical Spirit, to offer a preliminary account of Hegel’s dynamic account of the relationship between mind and world – a process of co-constitution of conceptual capacities and ontological structures of objectivity that transcends either position.