Heidegger in the Face of the Environmental Question by Leff, Enrique;

Short description:

This volume engages with the work of Heidegger to argue that the environmental crisis stems from the symbolic codification of the world from the Logos of Greek philosophy to the rationality of the modern world and resulting in a metaphysics that privileged a concern with ontological ‘being’ over material conditions.

Long description:

This volume engages with the work of Heidegger to argue that the modern environmental crisis is fundamentally a crisis of understanding Life, resulting from the symbolic codification of the world from the Logos of Greek philosophy to the rationality of the modern world and resulting in a metaphysics that privileges ontological thinking on the "question of being" over the environmental question and the concern for the conditions of life.

Exploring the work of the three principal thinkers of the Lebensphilosophie— Bergson, Dilthey, and Husserl—it charts the itinerary of Heidegger’s work and exposes its conflicts with the work of Marx, Plessner, Haar, and Derrida. A critical argument against the colonization of the world by Eurocentric reason and for the deconstruction of Capital, Heidegger in the Face of the Environmental Question draws on Latin American environmental thought to re-think the conditions for life on Earth.

It will therefore appeal to scholars of philosophy, political theory, and political sociology with interests in environmental philosophy, political ecology, and socioeconomic transformation.

Table of Contents:

1. Prolegomena  2. Being/Life: Heidegger in Face of the Environmental Question  3. The Phenomenology of Life and the Facticity of Human Existence  4. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, the Ontological Turn and the Order of Life  5. The Environmental Question and the Paths of Thinking: the History of Being and the Immanence of Life