The Philosophy of Ecology and Sustainability: New Logical and Informational Dimensions

Abstract

Ecology and sustainability are current narratives about the behavior of humans toward themselves and the environment. Ecology is defined as a science, and a philosophy of ecology has become a recognized domain of the philosophy of science. For some, sustainability is an accepted, important moral goal. In 2013, a Special Issue of the journal Sustainability dealt with many of the relevant issues. Unfortunately, the economic, ideological, and psychological barriers to ethical behavior and corresponding social action remain great as well as obvious. In this paper, I propose that a new, non-standard and non-propositional logic of real processes, Logic in Reality (LIR) grounded in physics applies to the science and philosophy of these narratives and helps to explicate them. Given the ecological role of organizations and institutions, reference is often made to organizational or institutional logics as guides to ecological practice. This paper suggests that these logics are either too abstract or too informal to have an impact in a conflictual world. Recognition of the suggested new, transdisciplinary logical dimension of ecological processes may provide credibility and support to new initiatives in ecology and its philosophy.

Promoting the Eco-Dialogue through Eco-Philosophy for Community

“…The last quadrant of the figure refers to the last two levels of the recipients of these practices, the community level and that of society as a whole, which can benefit under the same formal conditions applied by eco-philosophical practices and environmental ethics, adapted to these areas and fields. The increasingly ecological role of organizations and institutions in a community also brings to mind the concept of sustainability as an important moral goal that can be achieved much more easily through the philosophy dedicated to the environment called Philosophy of Ecology [75]. Usually, philosophical counseling is developed within philosophical practices through the way of working concepts, tools, and methods used that can be identified by the new specialization, with a different role from the consecrated occupation by the philosopher [76] or by any other form of psychotherapy intended for the person or groups [77].…”

Eco-agriculture and Farming in the Anthropocene Epoch: A Philosophical Review

“…Lastly, this paper improves the efforts in applying the value criteria above based on the logic in reality (LIR), which defines the basis of the logic of moral responsibility known as sustainabilization. Hofkirchner in [37] develops this concept as a process of suppression and rejection of anthropogenic breakdown and alternative safeguard development of the threshold of endangering biodiversity and the maintenance of society. Thus, by understanding the logical relationships between the human and non-human as the domain of nature, it will be fundamental strategies for evolving the socio-epistemology of society in real transformative action.…”

Social Systems: The Global Sustainable Information Society. Ecology

“…The emphasis in the Information Ecology of Zhong, however, is on its function as a holistic methodology that can be applied for example to Intelligence Science but also to ecology. In Zhong's words: "The common feature of ecology and information ecology, the core of ecological methodology, is the concern with the interrelations among all the elements of an ecosystem and the ecosystem as a whole [5]." As Brenner showed elsewhere, Logic in Reality extends the categorial feature of nonseparability to mereology, a new view of part-whole interactions of which Zhong gives a clear example in ecology.…”