Thursday, March 31, 2011

Environmental Philosophy journal

The latest issue of Environmental Philosophy (Spring 2011, Vol. 8, no. 1), the official journal of the International Association for Environmental Philosophy, was just released. Among the essays, two are written by participants in the electronic seminar referred to in the description of this blog. Forrest Clingermann (who also founded and writes for this blog) wrote "From Artwork to Place: Finding the voices of Moreelse, Bacon, and Beuys at the Hermeneutical Intersection of Culture and Nature." Janet Donohoe is the author of the second essay entitled "The Place of Home."

Clingerman looks at theological investigations concerning culture and nature asking the question of how theological reflection on art informs our "consideration of nature." Clingerman's inquiry into three specific works leads him to conclude a possible "hermeneutical mediation between art, place, and the spiritual."

Donohoe addresses what she calls the "normative power of place, specifically the place of home, on our embodied constitution." Investigating the concepts of "homeworld" and "alienworld" from a Husserlian perspective, Donohoe asks "why place would have a normative power and to what extent that normativity can be drawn into question through encounters with the alienworld." She concludes with a brief examination on the implications of the normative priority of homeworld for those who are displaced and "whether alien place can ever take on the normative and identity power of home place."

While Clingerman's essay is more explicitly hermeneutical in focus and Donohoe's is phenomenological, the latter is certainly implicitly, if not overtly, hermeneutical in its approach and style. Both essays can rightly be considered as contributions to the growing literature of environmental hermeneutics.

Sunday, March 13, 2011

AESS-CFP Deadline Extended

The Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences has extended the deadline for abstracts to March 22 for its annual conference to be held in Burlington, Vermont, June 23 - 26. "Confronting Complexity" is the theme of the conference. For more details see www.aess.info.