Nature as Resource, Aesthetic Experience, and Ecological Challenge

Lunedì 8 giugno
Herta Nagl-Docekal (University of Vienna)
What Do We Mean When We Use the Term ‘Nature’? Exploring Immanuel Kant’s Multi-Faceted Approach
The detrimental impact of the Anthropocene, in terms of the rapidly progressing damage to the biosphere as well as the increasing social and ethnic inequalities it causes, is one of today’s most pressing issues. Various ways of responding to these alarming conditions have been elaborated, for instance, in planetary thinking, cultural ecology, and environmental ethics. To achieve a sound conceptual basis for an in-depth analysis of these issues, the seminar outlines Kant’s views on the importance of nature for all spheres of human life, with reference to the sciences and biology, morality and justice, history and politics, and aesthetics and religion. Specific attention is drawn to the important tools Kant’s moral philosophy provides for challenging the harmful impact of (post-)colonial and (neo-)liberal ideas, as encountered by many people around the globe today.


Martedì 9 giugno
Ludwig Nagl (University of Vienna)
The Human “Language Animal” and Its Varied Relations to Nonhuman Nature
In his book The Language Animal. The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity (2016) Charles Taylor investigates the specific human mode of being in the world. Exploring his approach, the seminar addresses three aspects of the relation between the human “language animal” and nonhuman nature. Part 1 discusses our capacity to address nature in an “enframing” or “designative” way, which entails the possibility of addressing our natural environment in a predominantly instrumentalist mode. Part 2 challenges the predominance of the concept of “enframing” in modern analytical theories of language, arguing that the human linguistic capacity is more multiform, including “capacities for meaning creation”. Part 3 addresses experiences of natural beauty and of the “sublime”, as well as poetic-, religion- and philosophy-oriented approaches to the “cosmos” in which we, as finite human beings, live.