The Philosophy of the Young Kant: The Precritical Project is a study of Kant’s early writings and their context. Although Kant’s career spanned more than half a century-from the first texts in 1746 to his final notes in 1801, only his late and “critical” writings, from 1781 to 1790, have received attention. Kant’s pre-critical writings, by contrast, remain largely unknown. The Philosophy of the Young Kant tries to fill this gap by tracing his early pursuits: part I deals with Kant’s starting point and original question, the nature of energy; part II explores his quest for an answer, the “pre-critical project” of the 1750s; and part III traces the climax of the project in the 1760s and Kant’s crisis. Kant explored the interplay of force and continuum, the evolution from chaos to complexity, the ontological commercium of power points, and the dynamic patterns of matter, space, and autonomy. These early efforts had been widely dismissed as incoherent and misguided. But Kant’s pre-critical ideas actually form a coherent project, a long-term endeavor of combining a verifiable account of physical nature with fitting conceptions of purpose, freedom, and God. In retrospect, his early ideas anticipated numerous fundamental discoveries in fields as diverse as climate studies, ecology, particle physics, and cosmology. The book concludes that Kant’s pre-critical project is more timely and informative than expected, and that an acquaintance with his radically innovative starting point is indispensable for an appreciation of the depth of his oeuvre.
Abstract. While humanity is altering planet Earth at unprecedented magnitude and speed, representation of the cultural driving factors and their dynamics in models of the Earth system is limited. In this review and perspectives paper, we argue that more or less distinct environmental value sets can be assigned to religion – a deeply embedded feature of human cultures, here defined as collectively shared belief in something sacred. This assertion renders religious theories, practices and actors suitable for studying cultural facets of anthropogenic Earth system change, especially regarding deeper, non-materialistic motivations that ask about humans' self-understanding in the Anthropocene epoch. We sketch a modelling landscape and outline some research primers, encompassing the following elements: (i) extensions of existing Earth system models by quantitative relationships between religious practices and biophysical processes, building on databases that allow for (mathematical) formalisation of such knowledge; (ii) design of new model types that specifically represent religious morals, actors and activities as part of co-evolutionary human–environment dynamics; and (iii) identification of research questions of humanitarian relevance that are underrepresented in purely economic–technocratic modelling and scenario paradigms. While this analysis is by necessity heuristic and semi-cohesive, we hope that it will act as a stimulus for further interdisciplinary and systematic research on the immaterial dimension of humanity's imprint on the Earth system, both qualitatively and quantitatively.
For China today, environmentalism is central. The socialist doctrine of “Xi Jinping Thought” prioritizes transitioning to sustainability in the goal of building an “Ecological Civilization”. This creates unprecedented opportunities for Daoist practitioners to engage in state-coordinated activism (part 1). We show how the science of the planetary crisis (part 2) resonates with Daoist values (part 3), how these values integrate in national policy goals (part 4), and how this religious environmental activism plays out in case studies (part 5).
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