The raising of environmental philosophy and their ethics changed the concept of heritage. All domains of social activity are confronted with the necessity of rethinking their paradigm, not only the economy, but also the school, from all levels, the two political systems, capitalism and socialism, for the reason that the humankind walk to discovery the pathway to a new era, towards an ecological civilization. A short synthesis concerning the fundamental concepts of environmental philosophy will be discussed to make this debate accessible to the common people and to the common social leaders: entrepreneur, politic, journalist, teacher, student. The authors are in the domain of philosophy, political philosophy, because the critique against anthropocentrism and the critique against ethnocentrism, the concept of environmental reason, are the beacons to guide and protect the canoe of lives and to discover a new ecological civilization. The paradigm of environmental tourism is a core of this research.
TopEnvironmental Philosophy In The West
If every systematic-philosophical construction is built on an intrinsic foundation, a fundamental intuition or attraction to an objective, then the starting point of the philosophical renewal in the 20th century was the concept of environment.
The main purpose (desideratum) of this philosophical renewal is to justify, while invoking the concept Kant’s “reason”, why the Environmental Ethics should prevail over the most advanced achievements of science, the blindness of science face moral and ethics. And, to prevail over Liberal Democracies and Socialism in the past 20 centuries, which are responsible together for the environmental crisis and conflicts. However, this reason is no more the Kantian reason; a new concept of the reason emerged, which I call “Environmental reason”.
If the object of science is to explain the world machinery, then scientific laws are amoral, and the answer to the categorical imperative of “how to live in the world” belongs to the domain of philosophy and ethics. In this sense, the environmental ethics enquire the value of science and the value of social development, not only in an anthropocentric dimension but also according to the new ethics principles: Life before Man and Earth before Life, in a dialectic sense!
This essay want to analyze how the modern Philosophy of Nature, and later, the Environmental Philosophy, allow a new ontology critique of the anthropocentrism, and a new epistemology, based on the critique of the ethnocentrism and create a new ethical theory, which, in our opinion, has a universal value and practical ethics that are applicable to all the social fields.
From this perspective we could rethink the concept of reason, increasing its meaning to the concept of “Environmental reason”, a critical reason of the principle of anthropocentrism and of the principle of ethnocentrism.
The critique of the anthropocentrism considers the Judeo-Christian culture responsible for the arrogant attitude of the human beings against other species and Nature. The author believe that this relationship is not linear and immediate, and its critical perspective and contribution wish to enlarge the scope of this debate.
The critical perspective of environment philosophy toward the ethnocentrism claims the following:
Ethnocentrism is an emotionally conditioned approach that considers and judges other societies by their own culture’s criteria. It’s easy to see that this attitude leads to contempt and hate of all ways of life that are different from that of the observer. (Dias, 1961, p. 219)
The critique of ethnocentrism not only justifies the respect for all national cultures and all forms of classical and popular cultural expression, but also rejects any notion of superiority from a certain model of society, race or ethnicity.