University Park, Pennsylvania, United States
  •  135
    Biodiversity at Twenty-Five Years: Revolution Or Red Herring?
    with Nicolae Morar and Brendan J. M. Bohannan
    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...
  •  118
    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
  •  87
    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
  •  66
    Life beyond Biologism
    Research 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
  •  64
    Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature
    Northwestern 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
  •  50
    The Elemental Past
    Research 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
  •  50
    Nature and Negation
    Chiasmi International 2 107-117. 2000.
  •  41
    Chiasm and Chiaroscuro
    Chiasmi International 3 225-240. 2001.
  •  40
    Chiasma e chiaroscuro (riassunto)
    Chiasmi International 3 241-241. 2001.
  •  38
    Gestalts and Refrains
    Environmental 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
  •  38
    Presentazione
    Chiasmi International 15 (3): 17-18. 2013.
  •  38
    Eco-Phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself (edited book)
    with Charles S. Brown
    State University of New York Press. 2003.
    Explores how continental philosophy can inform environmental ethics
  •  36
    Riassunto: La melodia della vita e il motivo della filosofia
    Chiasmi International 7 279-279. 2005.
  •  35
    La Natura e la negazione (riassunto)
    Chiasmi International 2 118-118. 2000.
  •  34
    Chiasme et cIair-obscur (résumé)
    Chiasmi International 3 241-241. 2001.
  •  31
    Naturalizing phenomenology
    Philosophy Today 43 (4): 124-131. 1999.
  •  31
    Hijacking Sustainability (review)
    Environmental Philosophy 7 (2): 178-182. 2010.
  •  30
    Nature and Negation
    Chiasmi International 2 107-117. 2000.
  •  30
    Natural Time and Immemorial Nature
    Philosophy Today 53 (Supplement): 214-221. 2009.
  •  26
    Our Monstrous Futures
    Symposium: 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
  •  25
    Résumé: La mélodie de la vie et Ie motif de la philosophie
    Chiasmi International 7 279-279. 2005.
  •  25
    Truth and Resistance
    Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 30 (1): 111-124. 2009.
  •  23
    Note From the Editorial Team
    with Mauro Carbone and Federico Leoni
    Chiasmi International 17 19-20. 2015.
  •  21
    How Not to be a Jellyfish
    In Christian Lotz & Corinne Painter (eds.), Phenomenology and the Non-Human Animal, Springer. pp. 39--55. 2007.
  •  20
    Absolution of Finitude in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit
    Southwest Philosophy Review 12 (2): 141-156. 1996.
  •  20
  •  19
    Le temps des voix animales
    Chiasmi 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