2024

Ecophilosophy

Name: Ecophilosophy
Code: FIL14586M
6 ECTS
Duration: 15 weeks/156 hours
Scientific Area: Philosophy

Teaching languages: Portuguese
Languages of tutoring support: Portuguese, English
Regime de Frequência: Presencial

Presentation

An omnidisciplinary journey to the most secret roots of the global crisis, the methodology of complexity is raised in this UC to the scale of the system, in order to make a deep understanding of the event in the world in which we are today, in order to break the inert consciousness.

Sustainable Development Goals

Learning Goals

Competences:
The dramatic model of the syllabus primarily aims at encouraging the students to attune the epistemic way of thinking (critical, reflective, interdisciplinary, systemic) to the very nature of its object (complex).
Knowledge:
The students are expected to encompass and to deepen a vast, complex panorama of historical and contemporary info and data, stemming from multiple sources (epistemic and mediatic), and to assimilate a mass of knowledge rooted in various disciplines and modalities of knowledge (scientific, humanistic, philosophical, political-economic).
Skills:
Besides the basic reading, interpreting, argumentative and critical skills to be developed by the students, the latter will also acquire the ability to both interconnect and to put into question conventional wisdom, and to embrace a fruitful and active viewpoint within the challenging chart of the present era and the unfathomable horizon of the future. Each of these skills is double-faced: the one is turned towa

Contents

O Methodological Overture
- Socionatural ecosystem and systemic thought of complexity (Hegel, Morin)
- Binary-linear, spheric and speculative logics, temporalities and ontologies
1 Cenaries of global policrisis
Ecosystemic apocalypse, standpoints of the consciousness (negationism, interpassivity), theories (essence of technology, Capitalocene), post-truth, finitude
2 Backstage and plot
- Gaia (Lovelock) and Medea (Ward) hypotheses; Anthropocene; Earth and World (Latour, Heidegger)
- From Kantian teleological organicism to Teilhard’s evolutionism
- Life, Being-towards-death, eros/thanatos, finitude, ‘Being-towards-extinction’
- The Work of the Negative across the bio/eco/anthropo/nootechno-spheres
- Gaia and homo sapiens:
A speculative dialectics of embedment and separation
Modern Cartesian Subject, Being-in-the-world, chair du monde
3 Denouements
- From moral imperative to ecological imperative: reconstructing Kant and Jonas
- Readings and bets: prospective – transfiguration

Teaching Methods

The learning process leans on three methodological components: lectures, presenting the main theoretical structures and contents; close reading and debate of selected texts and topics; cross-references between the topics of the CU and the research projects of the students. These components span between a lesser and a maximal participation of the students, thus qualifying as elements of evaluation. The evaluation is concluded through a final paper (80%) which may incorporate pertinent contributions form the personal research of each student (between 3000 and 5000 words).
Alternatively, the evaluation process may consist of one final written test (100%).

Teaching Staff

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