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
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.