Spirituality After Darwin: ‘Dark Green’ Nature Religion and the Future of Religion and Nature
New Religions come and go but some persist and become major global forces. In this presentation, Professor Taylor presents evidence that, especially since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, a new, global, earth religion has been rapidly spreading around the world. Whether it involves conventional religious beliefs in non-material divine beings, or is entirely naturalistic and involves no such beliefs, it considers nature to be sacred, imbued with intrinsic value, and worthy of reverent care. Those having affinity with such spirituality generally have strong feelings of belonging to nature, express kinship with non-human organisms, and understand the world to be deeply interconnected.
In a recent book, Taylor labeled such phenomena ‘dark green religion’, noting that its central ethical priority is to defend the earth’s biocultural diversity. Taylor provides a wide variety of examples of new forms of religious (and religion-resembling) cultural innovation among those promoting such nature spirituality, from individuals (including artists, scientists, filmmakers, photographers, surfers, and environmental activists), to institutions (including museums, schools, and the United Nations). By tracking these, Taylor provides an opportunity to consider what such spirituality may portend for the religious and planetary future.
Bron Taylor is Professor of Religion, Nature, and Environmental Ethics at the University of Florida. His research involves both ethnographic and historical methods, and much of it focuses on grassroots environmental movements, their emotional, spiritual, and moral spiritual dimensions, and their environmental, cultural, and political impacts.
This event is sponsored by the India China Institute at The New School.
Refreshments will be provided. Seating is limited – please RSVP here
Andrea Pitts, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, gives a lecture entitled:
“Carceral Medicine and Prison Abolition: Trust and Truth-telling in Correctional Healthcare”
The United States Supreme Court ruled in 1976 that the privation of healthcare for incarcerated persons would constitute a violation of the Eighth Amendment. While that ruling, in effect, mandated a standard of care for incarcerated persons, the institutional means through which healthcare is provided in federal, state, and private detention facilities have been neither uniform nor without their share of problems. A number of human rights organizations and prisoner advocacy groups have documented patterns of neglect and malpractice within the nation’s prisons, jails, and detention facilities, including basic sanitary concerns, undertreatment for severe illnesses and injuries, and the structural incapacity of many correctional healthcare systems to meet the needs of their aging patients. Alongside the literature outlining concerns in correctional healthcare, a distinct and theoretically dense body of evidence on the structural patterns of racism operating through carceral systems in the U.S. has also demanded scholarly and political attention. Much of this work marks the continuities that mass incarceration in the U.S. has with historical patterns of disenfranchisement, exploitation, and state-sanctioned violence inflicted on communities of color, and especially Black Americans. Within this discourse, arguments for penal abolition have become prominent alongside critiques of structural racism. In this vein, a number of scholars and activists have been calling for the comprehensive dismantling of penal institutions, legislative measures, and associated corporations that have built the very carceral networks that perpetually inflict harm on communities of color both in the U.S. and abroad. In dialogue with contemporary research on correctional healthcare and literature on institutional racism in the context of clinical and colonial medicine, this presentation analyzes trust and truth-telling among patients and providers in correctional settings with the aim of developing an argument for the abolition of systems of incarceration. While the improvement of systems of healthcare has been defended as an important goal within the field of correctional medicine, structural epistemic injustices operating through race, gender, and disability within correctional medicine point toward a broader argument for the dismantling of carceral systems of punishment more generally.
Bio:
Andrea J. Pitts is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. Their research interests include philosophy of race and gender, social epistemology, Latin American and U.S. Latina/o philosophy, and philosophy of medicine. Their publications appear in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Radical Philosophy Review, and Inter-American Journal of Philosophy. Dr. Pitts is also currently co-editing two forthcoming volumes: one on the reception of the work of Henri Bergson in decolonial thought, feminism, and critical race studies, and a volume on contemporary scholarship in U.S. Latina and Latin American feminist philosophy.
Abstract || Traditionally privacy is valued for protecting individual freedom and autonomy. Such concepts of privacy and the underlying idea of autonomy have drawn criticism from various quarters. Feminist thinkers and critical theorists have advanced such criticism on normative grounds. In the recent years, they have been joined by arguments on a pragmatic level, which show that such concepts of privacy no longer can orient life in a world permeated with new threats to privacy, in particular due to the development of information technology. In consequence, many theories have reconstructed concepts privacy in light of this criticism, often by invoking more relational concepts of autonomy. The talk proposes a different approach. Using a more socially situated concept of the subject, which is derived from Hannah Arendt’s thought, it shows that privacy plays a more fundamental value for the constitution of subjectivity, beyond autonomy.
Presented by The New School for Social Research
Tobias Matzner works in political philosophy and philosophy of technology. He is a visiting scholar at the Department of Philosophy at The New School for Social Research, and a member of the International Centre for Ethics in the Sciences and Humanities in Tübingen, Germany.
A number of philosophers working on Buddhist traditions have recently explored similarities between the cultivated experience of not-self, and the clinical experience of depersonalization. In this talk, I will offer some reflections on this theme. But my primary aim will be to push a similar kind of exploratory project one step further. Drawing on tools from cognitive and computational neuroscience, as well as insights from Yogācāra Buddhist philosophy, I will explore some of the most significant similarities and differences between anomalous experiences evoked by meditation, and anomalous experiences that are commonly labeled as hallucinations. I will then argue that understanding how such experiences are produced offers a powerful framework for thinking about the socially and historically situated nature of everyday experience.