The New International Bookshop

Thursday March 24th
7pm, New International Book Shop
54 Victoria St, Carlton, 3053 

Admission $10/$5 (student/unemployed)

As part of NIBS Environmental focus in March, Philosopher Arran Gare will give a SEARCH Talk, about the topic of his forthcoming book – Towards an Ecological Civilization.

Arguing that culture is central to capitalism’s dynamics, Gare presents the thesis that an overcoming of capitalism requires a rejection of the dominant ontology based in economic categories of existence and its mechanistic approach to metaphysics.

Reading Marx as a cultural philosopher within the context of German Philosophy, against what he describes as orthodox tendencies that replicate capitalist conceptions of humans as economic subjects and a mechanistic world views of domination over the natural world, Gare holds that culture is primary, and cannot be dismissed as mere superstructure.

Building from this conclusion Gare argues that human freedom requires the creation of a culture that realizes humans as part of nature’s ecological processes, and provides alternatives to the current economic categories of existence.

Gare sees that the development of post-mechanistic science and ecology can provide alternative catagories, and is as central to overcoming capitalism and developing a radically different ecological civilization.”

Arran Gare is Associate Professor (Reader) in Philosophy and Cultural Inquiry and founder of the Joseph Needham Centre for Complex Processes Research, Swinburne University, Melbourne, Australia. The focus of his research is on transforming culture to create an environmentally sustainable global civilization. He has published widely on the history of culture, process metaphysics, the metaphysical foundations of the sciences, the philosophy of mathematics, complexity theory, human ecology, the emergent theory of mind, social and cultural theory and political philosophy. He is the author of Nihilism Incorporated: European Civilization and Environmental Destruction (Bungandore: Eco-Logical Press, 1993), Beyond European Civlization: Marxism, Process Philosophy and the Environment (Bungandore: Eco-Logical Press, 1993), Postmodernism and the Environmental Crisis (London: Routledge, 1995) and Nihilism Inc.: Environmental Destruction and the Metaphysics of Sustainability (Sydney: Eco-Logical Press, 1996). He is also the founding editor of the online journal Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy.

This is the first talk of the new SEARCH talk series – Book launches & talks aimed at better understanding Australia’s past and future from a progressive perspective.

Co-sponsored by the SEARCH Foundation, Trades Hall and The New International Bookshop.