Heidegger in the Face of the Environmental Question (Critiques and Alternatives to Capitalism)

This volume engages with the work of Heidegger to argue that the modern environmental crisis is fundamentally a crisis of understanding Life, resulting from the symbolic codification of the world from the Logos of Greek philosophy to the rationality of the modern world and resulting in a metaphysics that privileges ontological thinking on the "question of being" over the environmental question and the concern for the conditions of life.

Exploring the work of the three principal thinkers of the Lebensphilosophie― Bergson, Dilthey, and Husserl―it charts the itinerary of Heidegger’s work and exposes its conflicts with the work of Marx, Plessner, Haar, and Derrida. A critical argument against the colonization of the world by Eurocentric reason and for the deconstruction of Capital, Heidegger in the Face of the Environmental Question draws on Latin American environmental thought to re-think the conditions for life on Earth.

It will therefore appeal to scholars of philosophy, political theory, and political sociology with interests in environmental philosophy, political ecology, and socioeconomic transformation.

Enrique Leff is Emeritus Professor in the Institute for Social Research and the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and Emeritus Researcher at the National Council of Humanities, Science and Technology, Mexico. He was the former Coordinator of the Environmental Training Network for Latin America and the Caribbean at the United Nations Environment Program. He is the author of Political Ecology: Deconstructing Capital and Territorializing Life (2021) and Green Production: Towards an Environmental Rationality (1995).