ABSTRACT
According to some scientists, humankind’s current inuence on the biosphere has become so extensive that we have entered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. The new term is useful for gaining media attention, but concerns about humanity’s inuence on the biosphere have been growing for decades. At rst, academic research about environmentally damaging human activity was largely conned to certain branches of natural science. In the late 1970s and 1980s, however, a few philosophers began to argue that their discipline could shed light on environmental issues and recommend how to address them. Resistance to the very idea of ‘environmental ethics’ was widespread among professional philosophers, who regarded as absurd the idea that trees or even biomes could have moral standing. Like other humanists, philosophers still sharply distinguished between mind and body, freedom and necessity, historical human processes and merely natural events. Although accepting Darwin’s hypothesis that humans arose from the same evolutionary processes that shaped the rest of life on Earth, humanists typically had little interest in nature as studied by the natural sciences. The humanities were devoted to studying and assessing human products, such as texts and works of art, and human events, including those deemed signicant in human history.
