Speaker: Vesa Arponen # STIS PhD student
14th Oct 2011
15:30 - 17:00
Seminar Room, Ground Floor, Chisholm House, High School Yards
All welcome, no need to book. Please note earlier start time.
Abstract
This talk critically discusses the possibility of understanding our collective performance of environmental problems by some form of social constructivist approach to social action. In the typical environmentalist and environmental historical argument, at the root of environmental problems is said to lie our culture's collective technocratic, capitalistic and materialistic orientation to nature.This argument appears to imply a form of constructivism as it explains social action by appeal to a shared normative orientation towards nature. By contrast, I argue that our collective performance of environmental problems is marked by division of labour of culturally and geographically dispersed masses engaged in an immense variety of everyday activities such that no general shared orientation can be found. Yet, the mass is in a non-epistemic agreement in form of life. I critically relate these ideas to the Strong Programme's constructivism and discuss an alternative reading of the later Wittgenstein.
Vesa Arponen is a current STIS PhD student.
Please do come along to hear this very interesting talk and enjoy the discussion which will follow, and feel free to invite friends and colleagues who are not on this mailing list. New STiS Msc and PhD students are particularly encouraged to attend this informal and friendly session.
For further information about accessibility please contact Isabel Fletcher at I.Fletcher@ed.ac.uk