ENVIRONMENTAL PHILOSOPHY AND ECOPHILOSOPHY

Abstract

Addressing the socioecological issue implies entering a plural, undefined and sometimes risky semantic domain. Any intuitive elaboration on our relationships with “nature” ends up employing concepts soaked in meaning, about which it is necessary to reflect further. More than that, any position taken in the face of the ecological threat tacitly supports certain assumptions about the place of humans in the cosmos, their possibilities and responsibilities in the face of more than human nature. This and other questions have been addressed by Environmental Philosophy for almost sixty years. The term ecophilosophy has been used mostly in a broad sense; sometimes appearing only as a synonym for environmental philosophy, sometimes indicating the intersection between the domains of ecological science and philosophy, or even naming the general scope of ecologically informed critical thinking, not specifically limited to academic philosophy. This article intends to argue that, beyond mere synonymy, the term ecophilosophy signals a specific line of approach to philosophical aspects concerning the socio-ecological problem, characterized by the rejection of the anthropocentrism implicit in the dominant conception of human-nature relations, and for a critical review of the conception of the environment and the ontoepistemological configuration that sustains it.