Eco-Logical Lives
The Philosophical Lives of Richard Routley/Sylvan and Val Routley/Plumwood
Dominic Hyde
AN INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHY OF TWO PIONEERS OF ECO-LOGICAL LIVING
Richard Sylvan and Val Plumwood were eminent twentieth-century Australian philosophers who, in the way of philosophers, devoted their lives to examining fundamental assumptions about thought and the world. Though they were both renowned logicians – and probed metaphysics, ethics, epistemology, social and political theory and economics – it was their determination to fuse the practical and the intellectual, to ‘walk the talk’, that made them special. The world they sought to elucidate was not solely interior; not for them mere navel-gazing or abstract theorising, but a passionate concern about the non-human world and the non-human others with which we share it: Sylvan was convinced of the culpability of the philosopher who could ‘fiddle while the Earth begins to burn’.
They were renowned as practical and rhetorical defenders of Australia’s forests, as zealous conservationists who not only campaigned for the non-human world but tried to codify philosophically an ‘environmental culture’ that would be ethically and rationally engaged with it. Their philosophical endeavours to provide a modern foundation for such a culture were as much rooted in the forests they inhabited and worked physically to protect as in the academy; indeed Plumwood claimed that her every word had ‘the thought of the forest behind it, as the ultimate progenitor and meaning of my speech’. To them, the separation of physical and intellectual labour was as wrong as, and symptomatic of, human alienation from nature; and they strove to reconnect these artificial, dangerous dichotomies. While Sylvan strove for the general ‘greening of ethics’, Plumwood became increasingly aware of other toxic dichotomies that infused gender politics, going on to gain recognition as a pioneering eco-feminist.
Sylvan and Plumwood were iconoclastic, anarchic, and spoke what they believed without concern for social nicety. In their lives and in their works they promoted an ‘eco-logic’ to live by, a world view that, in the years since their deaths, has become ever more essential. In the present volume Dominic Hyde explores their intertwined lives and complex ideas with lucidity, respect and clear-sighted affection.
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THE AUTHOR
Dominic Hyde is a philosophy lecturer at the University of Queensland. Before working in Queensland, he pursued doctoral work and later lectured at The Australian National University. His academic work focuses chiefly on issues in logic and metaphysics, with a particular emphasis on non-classical logic and paradox, and he has published books and numerous articles in major international journals in the field. Recent work has also been directed towards environmental philosophy, especially the pioneering work of Sylvan and Plumwood. He lives in a small house in the subtropical forest outside Brisbane.
CONTENTS
Chapter One. The Experience of Being Prey
Chapter Two. Fighting For the Forests
Chapter Three. Logical Beginnings
Chapter Four. Against Human Chauvinism
Chapter Five. Separate Lives
Chapter Six. The Delusion of Mastery
Chapter Seven. An Environmental Culture
Index
Publication date: 15 January 2014, 280pp. Colour and black and white illustrations
ISBN 978-1-874267-79-9 (HB) £65