Abstract
Humankind is caught in an escalating spiral of ecological, social and cultural destruction, of material and spiritual deprivation, and of a cancerous homogenization and “uglification” of the human life-worlds. Cancer and addiction are the universal metaphors of our time—cancerous, deadly growth and addiction to a suicidal and alienating life-style. Philosophy can not remain indifferent to this unprecedented ecological and cultural crisis. However, as Heidegger says, “it is in the very nature of philosophy never to make things easier but only more difficult.” A philosophy of the ecological crisis has to sail between the Scylla of easy answers and authoritative solutions on the one hand and the Charybdis of increasing the already prevailing confusion and disorientation on the other.
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Rudolf Bahro, Die Logik der Rettung, 307.
Ivan Illich, “The Shadow our Future Throws,” interview in New Perspectives Quarterly, 6 (Springer 1989), 23.
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© 1994 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Melle, U., Leuven, K.U. (1994). Philosophy and Ecological Crisis. In: Daniel, M., Embree, L. (eds) Phenomenology of the Cultural Disciplines. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 16. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-585-28556-6_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-585-28556-6_8
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