Micah Thomas Pimaro Jr

What does it mean to interpret crisis philosophically when the boundaries between natural catastrophe and political rupture appear unstable? Can conceptual frameworks developed to explain natural disasters illuminate moments of political breakdown, or does such a comparison risk conflating fundamentally different phenomena? These questions become pressing when the philosophical reflections of Mbembe and Kant are considered together. Mbembe’s analysis of power, violence, and subject formation examines how postcolonial societies experience rupture and reconfigure authority. Kant’s response to the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, by contrast, confronts a natural catastrophe that challenged theological and philosophical accounts of order and causation. How might these distinct reflections on crisis inform present attempts to understand large-scale disruption, including contemporary conflicts or war? This paper places Mbembe’s postcolonial critique in dialogue with Kant’s reflections on natural disaster to examine the ethical and epistemic significance of crisis. It analysed how disasters reveal limits of knowledge and responsibility, investigated how political crises exposed the fragility of social and institutional life, and assessed whether these forms of disruption can be understood within a shared philosophical framework. It maintained that integrating insights from postcolonial critique and early modern natural philosophy will clarify how crises simultaneously disclose epistemic limits and generate normative demands for reconstruction.

Summary/Abstract: A real debate around climate change must confront the tension between scientific objectivity and its sociopolitical and cultural entanglements that could stall or deter effective climate action. How would science then be reimagined and responsive to the interpretive and normative demands of such entanglements? This creates a challenge for scientific pluralism as to how to verify the coexistence of multiple, equally valid scientific paradigms in explaining the same events and withstand falsification. Where production, verification, distribution, and reception of knowledge are governed by competitive mechanisms, epistemic agents would become both producers and consumers; climate justice, a view that examines inequality and the historical responsibilities for climate change, would prioritise local, need-driven solutions over universally applicable models. A marketplace-based rationality, structured by exchange, competition, and mediated visibility, is not only descriptively accurate but also normatively indispensable in a time when place-specific knowledge must coexist in a productive tension.

Recent conversations in environmental studies tilt towards the imperative for local knowledge systems. This knowledge is often held by non-experts and outside formal institutional settings. Lived experiences offer alternative perspectives on environmental crises. The challenge, however, remains: how might alternate knowledge be integrated into broader environmental action conversations? In response, metaphysical coherentism, according to which reality consists of a network of independent elements, where every component is grounded in relation to others, is proposed. Such grounding could accommodate the plurality of perspectives that are inherent in the environmental crisis and address the top-down approach in policy frameworks. Metaphysical coherentism argues that greater clarity is needed in the ontological categories of environmental studies.