Masters Degrees (Philosophy)

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Browsing Masters Degrees (Philosophy) by browse.metadata.advisor "Du Toit, Henriëtte Louise"

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    Towards a renewed philosophy of nature in the West: making sense of our place in the world in conversation with Pierre Hadot
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2023-12) Fourie-Basson, Wiida Elizabeth; Du Toit, Henriëtte Louise; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Philosophy. Applied Ethics.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In the 1970s, the field of environmental ethics developed as a sub-discipline of philosophy in reaction to the large-scale destruction of the natural environment. Today we know, largely due to the contributions of thousands of scientists through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that humans and their activities continue to cause chronic and unprecedented environmental problems. Environmental ethicists and philosophy tended to blame anthropocentrism as an underlying attitude in Western thinking, for driving this destruction. In this thesis, I explore instead metaphysical questions concerning the nature of the human condition and our place in this world in conversation with the French philosopher, historian of philosophy and philologist, Pierre Hadot (1922-2010). It is Hadot’s contention that a revised notion of the ancient Western concept of a philosophy of nature, before it was collapsed into science per se, will enable humanity to again see the world as it is, in all its wonder and terror. He draws on Neoplatonism, a neglected reconceptualization of Platonism, for his development of such a modern philosophy of nature. In The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature (2006), Hadot excavates the original meaning of phusis (usually translated as ‘nature’), as the inexplicable surging-forth of reality, thereby providing a metaphysical foundation for the new philosophy of nature. He then proceeds to re-establish the validity of an aesthetic perception of nature in twentieth-century philosophy, drawing on the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. From an epistemological perspective, he succeeds in validating aesthetic knowledge of nature on par with scientific knowledge of nature. It is not a question of the one replacing the other, or that the one is better than the other. He shows that the ancient tradition of philosophy of nature affirmed that both a scientific and an aesthetic knowledge of nature are essential for an authentic human existence on earth. For Hadot, it is not a question of being anthropocentric versus being non-anthropocentric. Rather, we have an inherently and unavoidably ambiguous relation to nature. On the one hand, the Promethean human needs to exploit nature to survive and prosper. This is the dominant tradition in the Western intellectual tradition. On the other hand, what Hadot terms the Orphic approach to nature, is based on a deep respect for nature invigorated by a living perception of it. It is this latter approach to nature in the Western tradition that needs to be restored and strengthened if we want to obtain a sustainable balance between human need and ambition and the natural world.