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Author: Carl Cassegård Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1350176273 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 257
Book Description
Challenging the normalization of a capitalist reality in which environmental destruction and catastrophe have become 'second nature', Towards a Critical Theory of Nature offers a bold new theoretical understanding of the current crisis via the work of the Frankfurt School. Focusing on key notions of dialectics, natural history, and materialism, a critical theory of nature is outlined in favor of a more traditional Marxist theory of nature, albeit one which still builds on core Marxist concepts to confirm humanity's central place in manufacturing environmental misery. Pre-eminent thinkers of the Frankfurt school, including, Georg Lukács, Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, and Alfred Schmidt, are highlighted for their potential to diagnose the interpenetration of capitalism and nature in a way that neither absolutizes nor obliterates the boundary between the social and natural. Further theoretical claims and practical consequences of a critical theory of nature challenge other contemporary theoretical approaches like eco-Marxism, social constructivism and new materialism, to situate it as the only approach with genuinely radical potential. The possibility of utopian idealism for understanding and responding to the current climate crisis is carefully measured against the dangers of false hope in setting out realistic goals for change. Environmental change in turn is seen through the prism of recent cultural currents and movements, situating the power of a critical theory of nature in relation to understandings of the Anthropocene; concepts of apocalypse, and postapocalypse. This book culminates in a powerful tool for an anti-capitalist critique of society's painfully extractive relationship to a deceptively abstracted natural world.
Author: Carl Cassegård Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1350176273 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 257
Book Description
Challenging the normalization of a capitalist reality in which environmental destruction and catastrophe have become 'second nature', Towards a Critical Theory of Nature offers a bold new theoretical understanding of the current crisis via the work of the Frankfurt School. Focusing on key notions of dialectics, natural history, and materialism, a critical theory of nature is outlined in favor of a more traditional Marxist theory of nature, albeit one which still builds on core Marxist concepts to confirm humanity's central place in manufacturing environmental misery. Pre-eminent thinkers of the Frankfurt school, including, Georg Lukács, Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, and Alfred Schmidt, are highlighted for their potential to diagnose the interpenetration of capitalism and nature in a way that neither absolutizes nor obliterates the boundary between the social and natural. Further theoretical claims and practical consequences of a critical theory of nature challenge other contemporary theoretical approaches like eco-Marxism, social constructivism and new materialism, to situate it as the only approach with genuinely radical potential. The possibility of utopian idealism for understanding and responding to the current climate crisis is carefully measured against the dangers of false hope in setting out realistic goals for change. Environmental change in turn is seen through the prism of recent cultural currents and movements, situating the power of a critical theory of nature in relation to understandings of the Anthropocene; concepts of apocalypse, and postapocalypse. This book culminates in a powerful tool for an anti-capitalist critique of society's painfully extractive relationship to a deceptively abstracted natural world.
Author: Steven Vogel Publisher: SUNY Press ISBN: 9780791430453 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 238
Book Description
Against Nature examines the history of the concept of nature in the tradition of Critical Theory, with chapters on Lukacs, Horkheimer and Adorno, Marcuse, and Habermas. It argues that the tradition has been marked by significant difficulties with respect to that concept; that these problems are relevant to contemporary environmental philosophy as well; and that a solution to them requires taking seriously--and literally--the idea of nature as socially constructed.
Author: Robert J. Brulle Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 9780262522816 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 364
Book Description
In this book Robert Brulle draws on a broad range of empirical and theoretical research to investigate the effectiveness of U.S. environmental groups. Brulle shows how Critical Theory--in particular the work of Jürgen Habermas--can expand our understanding of the social causes of environmental degradation and the political actions necessary to deal with it. He then develops both a pragmatic and a moral argument for broad-based democratization of society as a prerequisite to the achievement of ecological sustainability. From the perspectives of frame analysis, resource mobilization, and historical sociology, using data on more than one hundred environmental groups, Brulle examines the core beliefs, structures, funding, and political practices of a wide variety of environmental organizations. He identifies the social processes that foster the development of a democratic environmental movement and those that hinder it. He concludes with suggestions for how environmental groups can make their organizational practices more democratic and politically effective.
Author: Andrew Biro Publisher: University of Toronto Press ISBN: 0802098401 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 377
Book Description
Environmental movements are the subject of increasingly rigorous political theoretical study. Can the Frankfurt School's critical frameworks be used to address ecological issues, or do environmental conflicts remain part of the "failed promise" of this group? Critical Ecologies aims to redeem the theories of major Frankfurt thinkers--Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse, among others--by applying them to contemporary environmental crises. Critical Ecologies argues that sustainability and critical social theory have many similar goals, including resistance to different forms of domination. Like the Frankfurt School itself, the essays in this volume reflect a spirit of interdisciplinarity and draw attention to intersections between environmental, socio-political, and philosophical issues. Offering textual analyses by leading scholars in both critical theory and environmental politics, Critical Ecologies underscores the continued relevance of the Frankfurt School's ideas for addressing contemporary issues.
Author: Max Horkheimer Publisher: A&C Black ISBN: 0826400833 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 313
Book Description
These essays, written in the 1930s and 1940s, represent a first selection in English from the major work of the founder of the famous Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. Horkheimer's writings are essential to an understanding of the intellectual background of the New Left and the to much current social-philosophical thought, including the work of Herbert Marcuse. Apart from their historical significance and even from their scholarly eminence, these essays contain an immediate relevance only now becoming fully recognized.
Author: Steve Garlick Publisher: UBC Press ISBN: 0774833327 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 237
Book Description
Social theorists have argued that as the complexity of our ecosystems becomes more apparent, the line between nature and culture, human and nonhuman, and technology and bodies becomes less distinct. Yet contemporary masculinity studies has generally failed to incorporate this new way of thinking. In this penetrating analysis of the relationship between gender and nature, Steve Garlick proposes that masculinity is best understood as a technology that shapes both our engagement with the natural world and how we define freedom. Extending the work of the Frankfurt School and Heidegger’s critique of modern technology, The Nature of Masculinity draws on case studies and new materialist theories to argue that the essence of technology is not in mechanical devices but in a particular relationship to natural forces. Within this critical framework, masculinity is a technology of embodiment, and freedom does not lie in the domination of nature but rather in fostering a new relation to it.
Author: Herbert Marcuse Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1136859977 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 257
Book Description
This second volume of Marcuse's collected papers includes unpublished manuscripts from the late 1960s and early 1970s, such as Beyond One-Dimensional Man, Cultural Revolution and The Historical Fate of Bourgeois Democracy, as well as a rich collection of letters. It shows Marcuse at his most radical, focusing on his critical theory of contemporary society, his analyses of technology, capitalism, the fate of the individual, and prospects for social change in contemporary society.
Author: Deborah Cook Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317548035 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 218
Book Description
Decades before the environmental movement emerged in the 1960s, Adorno condemned our destructive and self-destructive relationship to the natural world, warning of the catastrophe that may result if we continue to treat nature as an object that exists exclusively for our own benefit. "Adorno on Nature" presents the first detailed examination of the pivotal role of the idea of natural history in Adorno's work. A comparison of Adorno's concerns with those of key ecological theorists - social ecologist Murray Bookchin, ecofeminist Carolyn Merchant, and deep ecologist Arne Naess - reveals how Adorno speaks directly to many of today's most pressing environmental issues. Ending with a discussion of the philosophical conundrum of unity in diversity, "Adorno on Nature" also explores how social solidarity can be promoted as a necessary means of confronting environmental problems.
Author: Robyn Marasco Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231538898 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 241
Book Description
Hegel's "highway of despair," introduced in his Phenomenology of Spirit, is the tortured path traveled by "natural consciousness" on its way to freedom. Despair, the passionate residue of Hegelian critique, also indicates fugitive opportunities for freedom and preserves the principle of hope against all hope. Analyzing the works of an eclectic cast of thinkers, Robyn Marasco considers the dynamism of despair as a critical passion, reckoning with the forms of historical life forged along Hegel's highway. The Highway of Despair follows Theodor Adorno, Georges Bataille, and Frantz Fanon as they each read, resist, and reconfigure a strand of thought in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Confronting the twentieth-century collapse of a certain revolutionary dialectic, these thinkers struggle to revalue critical philosophy and recast Left Hegelianism within the contexts of genocidal racism, world war, and colonial domination. Each thinker also re-centers the role of passion in critique. Arguing against more recent trends in critical theory that promise an escape from despair, Marasco shows how passion frustrates the resolutions of reason and faith. Embracing the extremism of what Marx, in the spirit of Hegel, called the "ruthless critique of everything existing," she affirms the contemporary purchase of radical critical theory, resulting in a passionate approach to political thought.
Author: Martin Jay Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres ISBN: 029930650X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 266
Book Description
Tackles a question as old as Plato and still pressing today: What is reason, and what roles does and should it have in human endeavor? The eminent intellectual historian Martin Jay surveys Western ideas of reason, particularly in German philosophy from Kant to Habermas.
Author: Carl Cassegård
Author: Carl Cassegård
Author: Steven Vogel
Author: Robert J. Brulle
Author: Andrew Biro
Author: Max Horkheimer
Author: Steve Garlick
Author: Herbert Marcuse
Author: Deborah Cook
Author: Robyn Marasco
Author: Martin Jay