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talking about natural processes as distinct from society, others propose to abandon the nature-society distinction as outdated.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.

It is often believed that Hegel does not offer a philosophy of science. Focusing on the Phenomenology of Spirit, scholars frame subjective cognition and scientific method as defective approaches that give way to speculative thinking. In contrast, in my book I argue that Hegel presents an original epistemology that breaks both with Kant and the tradition of modern philosophy. Through an analysis of overlooked sections of his work—the Cognition section of the Science of Logic and the Psychology in the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit—I show that scientific practices are not defective cognitive activities but systematic forms of world-building that contribute to the articulation of the Idea. By tracing Hegel’s philosophy of science back to its Aristotelian and Platonic roots, I demonstrate (i) that Hegel’s sui generis epistemology resists categorization under pragmatism, post-Kantian constructivism, or conceptual realism; and (ii) that human rationality is not limited to cognitive processes but always embedded within larger social practices and the ontological structures of nature and reality.