Justin Simpson

Publisher's Description: This book argues that paying attention to nonhumans is an environmental virtue, making a case for why it matters and how it can be done well. While Western science and philosophy has tended to represent nonhumans as supposedly inert, passive, predictable, and prone to suffering, Justin Simpson highlights ways that nonhumans are surprising and creative subjects that go on playful adventures, undergoing and enacting substantial change in the world. Given that one can never know completely in advance what a nonhuman is capable of, one must pay attention to nonhumans to not only understand them, but ultimately respect, care for, and reciprocate them. Contesting accounts of attention and environmental ethics premised on a self/other dichotomy, sight models, and self-sacrifice, Towards an Environmental Ethic of Surprise: Adventures in Attention advances an account of adventurous attention, which involves travel, chance, and risk. In particular, this approach entails affectively immersing oneself in the worlds of nonhumans in a playful and improvisational way. Informed in part by posthumanism, the book challenges scientific realism and other accounts of empathy and attention that frame it as a chore rather than a joyful and rewarding process that leads to new agential abilities and subjectivities.

This paper pursues a fleshy environmental ethic of gratitude and reciprocity based on the references to flower and song within Aztec philosophy. By drawing attention to the affects associated with smelling the enrapturing scent of flowers and hearing beautiful birdsongs, this paper argues that such passages offer an environmental ethic of right relations that weaves together mind, body, and land as well as beauty, love, and wisdom. These affective experiences not only cultivate a sense of gratitude for more-than-human others, but also engender a becoming, loving relation, which precipitates beautiful thinking and creative acts of reciprocity.

This paper seeks to intervene in environmental ethics and social epistemology. Within a predominant strand of environmental ethics, one witnesses accounts based on nonhumans’ ability to suffer, and consequently, the passivity of nonhumans. On the other hand, social epistemology is often not social enough insofar as it does not include nonhumans. Seminal accounts of epistemic injustice often conceal or exclude the possibility that nonhumans can be subjects of knowledge and victims of epistemic injustice because of an anthropocentric bias that maintains propositional language is a necessary condition for knowledge. By presenting a non-anthropocentric, corporeal epistemology, this paper reveals a more affirmative account of nonhumans as epistemic agents with tacit, embodied knowledge. To prevent epistemic depreciation turning into ethical indifference or wrongdoing, this paper focuses on whether it is possible to commit epistemic injustices against nonhumans. In particular, this paper argues that humans can commit fourth-order epistemic exclusion, testimonial injustice, and testimonial smothering against nonhumans.

This paper seeks to advance the joyful environmental ethic of Robin Wall Kimmerer. According to Kimmerer's environmental ethic of gratitude and reciprocity, each person has a responsibility to share their unique gifts with the world in return for the gifts they have received from nature. Drawing on Karen Barad, this paper contends that nonhumans are active, open-ended, and relational singularities that also provide ontological gifts by coconstituting the very being of humans and the world. Since sharing one's gifts to make good gifts for a nonhuman requires knowing oneself and the nonhuman, this paper argues that open-ended curiosity is an onto-epistemic, environmental virtue because it enables humans to understand nonhumans as open-ended and relational singularities. Epistemically, a person must be open to transforming their beliefs and questions in relation to nonhumans. Ontologically, a person must be open to transforming their bodies, practices, and world in relation to nonhumans. To develop this account of open-ended curiosity, this paper engages the work of Vinciane Despret.

Political solutions to problems like global warming and social justice are often stymied by an inability to productively communicate in everyday conversations. Motivated by these communication problems, the paper considers the role of the virtuous listener in conversations. Rather than the scripted exchanges of information between individuals, we focus on lively, intra-active conversations that are mediating events. In such conversations, the listener plays a participatory role by contributing to the content and form of the conversation. Unlike Miranda Fricker’s negative virtue of testimonial justice, which neutralizes the listener’s identity-prejudices in their credibility judgments of the speaker’s testimony, we consider the positive virtues of a good listener. These positive virtues enable listeners to productively contribute to the conversation by helping create the fertile epistemic space of a non-adversarial, caring relationship that facilitates critical and creative thinking.

Although time was a predominate theme in Continental philosophy for the first half of the twentieth century, philosophical attention has increasingly shifted to space. This paper contributes to the phenomenology of space through Hans Blumenberg’s philosophical anthropology. Blumenberg elucidates the significance of phenomenological distance for the contingent existence of humans. Spanning from the experience of early human ancestors to history and epistemology, Blumenberg’s work reveals how contingency pervades human existence. Blumenberg understands names, myths, rhetoric, and metaphors as cultural techniques that function as means of self-preservation by distancing an overwhelming and disorienting reality and managing the felt contingency of human existence. Developing upon Blumenberg’s insights into human contingency and distance, the paper argues that detours offer a way to address the contemporary, existential issues posed by the increasing rate of technological change and environmental problems.