The loss of a single species is the loss of a world
At the event CApE Talk: Soul and Environment: Psycho-anthropology of the Nonhuman Worlds at CApE on March 27, Semine Long-Callesen wrote an article about the work of this semesters international CApE fellow professor Oxana Timofeeva, which is now in published in the online media Resilience.
“Plato is associated with Western metaphysics that historically has privileged humans above all other beings, knowledge over nature and mind over body, and finally an immaterial world of ideas over the physical world. In this hierarchical framework, we also find a taxonomy of intellectual capacities where thinking and writing belong to humans alone: man is superior, and his body is but a vessel to reach the world of ideas by his ability to think. “But if you look closer at Plato’s work”, says Timofeeva, “he speaks to desires, drives and the unconscious — like an early iteration of psychoanalysis.” Human beings are much more than their ability to think and produce knowledge. She argues that by reexamining an old philosophical term — the soul— from the perspective of literature from the 20th and 21st centuries, Plato can bring us closer to understanding the depth of the environmental crisis.
Read the full article here: The loss of a single species is the loss of a whole world - resilience