Disruptive philosophies: Eco-rational education and the epistemology of place ​​​​​​​

Abstract

Climate change and colonisation share many similarities. Both are the result of complex interactions between epistemology and ontology. Both are the indirect result of individualism and industrialisation. Both can be said to fail to recognise limits, and both have had many theses written on them already. Instead of focusing on one or the other, I join Val Plumwood in looking for a shared logic that underpins the two. Plumwood's work centres on trying to bring together multiple critiques of domination: feminism, critical race theory, indigenous philosophy and environmental philosophy, to explicate what they have in common: the logic of domination. The careful way in which she combines these fields allows her to argue that our current (Western) form of rationality, marked by an emphasis on the liberal individual's stark separation of the human from the earth and earth Others, is irrational. Further, it is a potentially suicidal rationality, in that it is not only divorced from, but unable to recognise, environmental limits, the observation of which is essential to human survival. To better explicate how the logic of domination operates in social, cultural, institutional and political habitats, I incorporate Albert Camus' search for moral limits into Plumwood's framework. If climate change and colonisation are underpinned by an ecologically irrational epistemology, then education as an instrument of liberal-democracy is implicated in the reproduction of ecological irrationality and is, therefore, a site of possible disruption of dominant logic. To this end, I discuss philosophical suicide, heavenism, epistemic violence, anthropocentricism, anthropomorphism, and the myth of reversal to illustrate the historical influences of Western philosophical thought that has dominated liberaldemocratic institutions. I follow dominant logic's legal and ontological instantiation through the doctrine of discovery, Terra Nullius, liberal-democracy, the Stolen Generations, the apology, the Northern Territory intervention, and the slaughterhouse. I show that how we remember the past, exercise our imagination, and conceive of truth and morality, can either perpetuate or mitigate dominant logic. The overarching two-part question of this thesis, then, is: (1) why are societies structured as they are? and (2) how does education reinforce or disrupt existing structures? Consequently, the thesis is in two parts. The first looks at the ways in which Australian xii