From 16 to 17 January 2023, the international conference Challenges for Environmental and Political Philosophy in the Anthropocene, organized by the Institute of Philosophy of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, v. v. i., took place in the premises of Bratislava Castle. The conference was held under the auspices of Jaroslav Karahuta, Chairman of the Committee of the National Council of the Slovak Republic for Agriculture and the Environment. The extraordinary success of the zero year of the international event was ensured not only by the top organization, but especially by the participation of experts in environmental and political philosophy from various parts of Europe, but also from Asia. The keynote speakers were Prof. Mark Coeckelbergh from the University of Vienna and Prof. Eric S. Nelson from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
Prof. Coeckelbergh, who is a world-renowned expert on ethics in the field of artificial intelligence and philosophy of technology, gave a lecture on the topic of Freedom in the Anthropocene: Bringing Political Philosophy to Global Environmental Problems on the first day of the conference. In his extremely interesting lecture, he opened several current problems in connection with the question of political freedom in the Anthropocene epoch. Coeckelbergh brought to Bratislava a fresh breath of the most up-to-date of the world’s environmental philosophy, which is now unthinkable without overlap into political philosophy, but also into technical and natural sciences. According to him, only living in the sense of a relational and environmental understanding of freedom and the realization of its conditions, including the creation of the right community and social environment, enables the survival and development of man and humanity. At the same time, he stated that a small revolution in the understanding of artificial intelligence is needed to develop political freedom. He stressed the need to rethink the role of artificial intelligence in relation to political freedom. At the end of the lecture, he presented his latest monograph entitled Digital Technologies, Temporality, and the Politics of Co-Existence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023).
The keynote speaker of the second day of the conference was Prof. Eric S. Nelson, a world authority in the field of environmental and political philosophy, who reflects on the concept of the Anthropocene with an emphasis on China’s philosophical heritage. In his lecture entitled Daoist Biopolitics, Anarchy, and Participatory Eco-Democracy, Prof. Nelson presented the traditional Taoist principle of wuwei as a possible starting point for participatory eco-democracy.
He presented a critical view of dualistic tendencies in the evaluation of two cultural traditions, European and Chinese. And he presented the risks of the political use of Taoism as an ideological tool, both in contemporary Europe and in contemporary China. Also surprising were the references to the intersections of Taoist philosophy with the French or German philosophical tradition (physiocratism and the principle of laissez faire or the connection of wuwei with mystical anarchism or socialism in kibbutzim). He presented the principle of wuwei (loosely translated – to act by inaction) from various points of view, in which the issues of freedom, the natural environment and also criticism of the authority of the ruler were intertwined. So how to understand the principle of wuwei? According to him, it is a relational action or action without assertive action (wei wu wei) in cooperation with the self-creation of things (ziran) and the nourishment of life (yangsheng). Thus, Taoist motives, through Ziranist ecology, could introduce self-regulating elements into the organization of democracy itself. Prof. Nelson concluded by presenting his latest publication Heidegger and Dao: Things, Nothingness, and Freedom (Bloomsbury, 2023).
The conference was actively attended by experts from Portugal (João Ribeiro Mendes pointed out the need to start thinking planetary), Italy (Agostino Cera presented his latest publication A Philosophical Journey Into the Anthropocene; Alessandro Volpi has questioned the top-down dichotomy in climate action and policymaking; Lorenzo de Stefano pointed out the environmental dimension of the subject of physical European thought), Turkey (Güncel Önkal critically assessed the contribution of COP27), Germany (Petra Gümplová philosophically reflected on the concept of common ownership of the Earth in the Anthropocene), Hong Kong, China (Anish Mishra, originally from India, reflected on the intersections of Indian and Buddhist conceptions of nature), Sweden and the USA (Dominika Janus and Sarah Hicks outlined the issue of ecological catastrophe as existential threats stemming from dubious ideals promoting the perspective of a long-term future) and from the Czech Republic (Martin Ritter focused on the issue of the need to create a deeper relationship with the Earth; Jan Géryk reflected on the possibilities of depsychologizing the public and Tomáš Korda critically evaluated the concept of sovereignty in times of environmental crisis).
The conference was also actively attended by several experts working in Slovakia. Dušan Gálik offered a reflection on the concept of the Anthropocene in science and philosophy. Anna Mravcová provoked a philosophical discussion about environmental citizenship with an emphasis on environmental responsibility. Elise Lamy-Rested followed the philosophical legacy of A. N. Whitehead and expressed the need to develop a speculative cosmology in the deconstruction of the Anthropocene. Eva Dědečková presented the topicality of the cosmological philosophy of Eugen Fink and Friedrich Nietzsche. Daniel Buschmann presented his state of research in the field of intercultural dialogue, which is necessary for political philosophy in the Anthropocene. And Katarína Podušelová proposed an original view on the issue of the environmental revolution as a necessary transformation of the way of thinking in a very specific sense.
The organizers of the international conference fulfilled the high expectations of domestic and foreign guests. The wish of the director of the Institute of Philosophy of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, Richard Stahel, to successfully fulfill the mission of the international conference – to get acquainted with the most up-to-date knowledge in the issue of interconnection of environmental and political philosophy and to establish contacts to develop future top international cooperation – was fulfilled and thanks to the feedback from the participants, it can be stated that this event started a new, extremely important tradition. The conference was held within the VEGA project No. 2/0072/21 Tasks of Political Philosophy in the Context of the Anthropocene.
Source: Press release of the Faculty of Philosophy SAS, v. v. i.
Photo: Martin Bystriansky