CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2013
| Author | Lippai, Cecilia |
|---|---|
| Title | Towards a Pluralistic Ontology of Environments. A Phenomenological Perspective |
| Summary | The starting point of this thesis is a critical observation, namely that contemporary environmental philosophy neglects to ask the ontological question ‘what is an environment’ and tends to suppose – explicitly or tacitly – that the environment is nature, planet Earth or a global ecosystem. On close analysis these global conceptions turn out to be less than helpful in capturing the being of an environment, and quite inefficient in environmental arguments due to their abstractness and remoteness from people’s everyday lives and concerns. Contrary to these approaches, this thesis attempts to grasp environments in their plurality through the analysis of everyday environmental experiences. The method used is a version of generative phenomenology, inspired by the works of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Jan Patočka, but adapted to the study of historical and dynamic phenomena such as environments. As a result of this pluralist phenomenological approach the being of environments is revealed to have two inseparable and co-generative aspects: an autonomous existence as a field of possibilities (affordances) and a hermeneutical realm composed of human ways to make sense of the surrounding world. This pluralistic, flexible and open-ended ontology turns out to have not only theoretical benefits in mediating between realist and constructivist positions, but also important practical consequences. Specifically, the last chapter of this thesis is dedicated to demonstrating that closer attention to patterns of experience leads to less prejudiced, more communicative, collaborative, and democratic environmental actions. |
| Supervisor | Weberman, David |
| Department | Philosophy PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2013/lippai_cecilia.pdf |
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