Concept
Environmental hermeneutics
Overview
Environmental hermeneutics is a term for a wide range of scholarship that applies the techniques and resources of the philosophical field of hermeneutics to environmental issues. That is to say it addresses issues of interpretation as they relate to nature and environmental issues broadly conceived to include wilderness, ecosystems, landscapes, ecology, the built environment (architecture), life, embodiment, and more. Work in environmental philosophy, ecocriticism, environmental theology, ecotheology, and similar disciplines may overlap the field of environmental hermeneutics.
In the public sphere, much of the focus on “the environment” is concerned with discovering scientific facts and then reporting how policy can act on these facts. On its face, philosophical hermeneutics might appear to be an unrelated enterprise. But... even the facts of the sciences are given meaning by how humans interpret them. Of course this does not mean that there are no facts, or that all facts must come from scientific discourse. Rather... [it calls] for mediation—the mediation that grounds the interpretive task of connecting fact and meaning through a number of different structures and forms. (Clingerman, et al. 2013, emphasis added)
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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(2) The _Realism_ of the purposiveness of nature is also either physical or hyperphysical. The _former_ bases the purposes in nature, by the analogy of a faculty acting with design, on the _life of matter_ (either its own or the life of an inner principle in it, a world-soul) and is called _Hylozoism_. The _latter_ derives them from the original ground of the universe, as from an intelligent Being (originally…
Immanuel Kant, Kant's Critique of Judgement
States what Environmental hermeneutics is.
In the third place, we shall limit ourselves to the particular consideration of the principle itself. Each principle has reigned for a certain time, and when the whole system of the world has been explained from this special form, it is called a philosophical system. Its whole theory has certainly to be learned, but as long as the principle is abstract it is not sufficient to embrace the forms belonging to our…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy
States what Environmental hermeneutics is.
At the outset, the rise of modern science prophesied a restoration of the intimate connection of nature and humanity, for it viewed knowledge of nature as the means of securing human progress and well-being. But the more immediate applications of science were in the interests of a class rather than of men in common; and the received philosophic formulations of scientific doctrine tended either to mark it off as…
John Dewey, Democracy and Education
Close in meaning to Environmental hermeneutics; the term itself is not named.
Related ideas
- Philosophy
- Life
- Architecture
- Nature
- Environmental philosophy
- Hermeneutics
- Ecology
- Ecotheology
- Environmental theology
Place in the tradition
Part of Environmental philosophy.
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