Tom Greaves

This thesis examines the question of living nature and its bearing on ecological thought in the light or the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. The difficulty of adequately thinking about living nature in the terms developed in Being and Time (1927) is taken as the starting point for the investigation. The thesis concentrates on Heidegger's thought in the period beginning with the 1929/30 lectures The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude and ending with the courses on Heraclitus in 1943 and 1944. In this 'middle period' Heidegger' attempts to fonnulate a phenomenology of animal life and then a thinking of the place of living nature in the 'history of being' which does not return to the vitalist principles with which he had previously broken. The thesis considers the extent to which these attempts to find another way to think about living nature are successful. To this end a variety of lecture and seminar courses together with manuscripts from this period are discussed, some of which have only recently become available, including the seminars on Nietzsche's second Untimely Meditation and Herder's Treatise on the Origin ofLanguage and the manuscripts Besinnung and Die Geschichte des Seyns. Contemporary responses to Heidegger's thinking of living nature and its relevance for philosophical ecology, including those of Jacques Derrida, Michel Haar, Giorgio Agamben and Michael Zimmennan are re-evaluated on this basis. -. :'. j,-- The guiding concept of the investigation is the notion of poverty, which plays a variety of roles in the context under discussion. In particular, the thesis presented in The Fundamental Concept of Metaphysics that the animal is 'poor in world', has been seriously misunderstood by many commentators. If the poverty in question is properly understood as a thesiS concerning the fundamental attunement of the encounter between Dasein and living nature, then we can see how this concept of poverty develops in various directions in the following years, informing Heidegger's understanding of the capabilities of living beings, of the 'earth', the silence of language and finally allows for the development of a thinking of freedom that is proper to the earth itself, rather than a development beyond the earthly. It is argued that the notion of poverty is an essential counter to a prevalent Spinozist and Nietzschean strain in ecological thought that thinks living nature on the basis of plenum or overflow and concedes no space for a true freedom of the earth

This paper rethinks positive aesthetics as a group of aesthetic practices rather than a set of doctrines or judgments. The paper begins by setting out a general approach to aesthetic practices based on Pierre Hadot’s notion of philosophical “spiritual exercises.” Three practices of positive aesthetics are then described: focusing the beauty of each thing; envisioning the beauty of everything; and allowing the beauty of all things. The paper warns against possible dangers to which each practice may fall prey, dangers that divert the practice from its perception cultivating and enhancing potential. The paper ends by drawing out key implications of this way of considering positive aesthetics for our understanding of beauty, negativity and artificiality.

As incoming Editor and Deputy Editor we describe our impression of the current situation that those committed to understanding and upholding environmental values find themselves in. We consider some of the factors that make enviornmental concern difficult to maintain, including conditions that affect us as academics, publishers, global citizens and activists. We describe some of the emerging trends that have appeared in Environmental Values in recent years, in philosophy, ecological economics, critical social science and widening interdisciplinarity in the environmental humanities. We highlight the journal's commitment to engaged, plural and open investigation of environmental values and consider what we might expect and hope for in the coming years.

The key role that animals play in our aesthetic appreciation of the natural world has only gradually been highlighted in discussions in environmental aesthetics. In this article I make use of the phenomenological notion of ‘perceptual sense’ as developed by Merleau-Ponty to argue that open-ended expressive-responsive movement is the primary aesthetic ground for our appreciation of animals. It is through their movement that the array of qualities we admire in animals are manifest qua animal qualities. Against functionalist and formalist accounts, I defend and develop an account of expressive-responsive movement as the primary perceptual sense of animals. I go on to suggest that the primacy of movement in the aesthetic appreciation of animals is also the primary sense of animal ‘wildness’, and that a key part of the rewilding paradigm should be the development of such appreciation.

Distinguishing between the source and the locus of value enables environmental philosophers to consider not only what is of value, but also to try to develop a conception of valuation that is itself ecological. Such a conception must address difficulties caused by the original locational metaphors in which the distinction is framed. This is done by reassessing two frequently employed models of valuation, perception and desire, and going on to show that a more adequate ecological understanding of valuation emerges when these models are fully contextualized in the intersecting life worlds of the ecological community. Ecological evaluation takes place in ongoing encounters between these worlds and a crucial part in this process is assigned to living beings that are “open-endedly open,” that is, open not only to what the world affords them and others, but open to an indefinite field of possible valuational encounters between all kinds of beings. Ecological valuation overcomes some of the conceptual failings of contemporary attempts to evaluate nature: “The Economics of Ecology and Biodiversity” and “Valuing Nature.”

Introduction -- Phenomenology : the logic of appearance -- Phenomenology without attitude -- The root of sense and sensibility -- Concrete sketches of experience -- The self-evidence and elusiveness of phenomena -- Dasein : a living question -- Interrogating ourselves -- Hermeneutics, philosophy, and ontological difference -- The facts of life -- More or less human -- World : the event of meaning -- Tackling the world around us -- Environmental breakdown and recovery -- Our world owns itself -- Anyone and everyone -- Already with others -- The dictatorship of the one -- The real and the authentic self -- Language bears the one -- Between our selves -- Finding oneself in a mood -- Where do moods belong? -- The fundamental tone of attunement -- Nothing to be anxious about -- The depths of boredom and love -- Meaning and truth -- Laying out understanding -- Disclosing and enclosing an horizon -- Decisive truths -- Excavating and sheltering the truth -- Time and space -- Extending our reach and making room -- Exploding, stretching and punctuating time -- Measuring out the dimension -- Ways of life and death -- The whole of life in death -- A call to indebted freedom -- Philosophy sacralised -- Origin and originality -- Original destruction -- History repeats itself -- Beginning again with the first beginning -- Arts and science : poetry and thought -- Undermining the academic divide -- Returning the arts and sciences to themselves -- The cult(ure) of technology -- Two cultures in one.