E-Books →The philosophy of social ecology

Free Download The philosophy of social ecology By Murray Bookchin
1996 | 106 Pages | ISBN: 155164018X | PDF | 8 MB
"There is nothing more natural than humanity's capacity to conceptualize, generalize, relate ideas, engage in symbolic communication, and innovate changes in the world around it, not merely to adapt to the conditions it finds at hand." (p. 119)

In a broad sense this book represents the culmination of an attempt to create a new philosophy of nature, that repudiates anti-rationalist tendencies, is humanistic, and embodies the best of the left's revolutionary tradition: social ecology.Honestly speaking, this is Murray Bookchin's most pompously written and most difficult to follow writing. The essays in this book were written independently (I think), and patched together as a book, so they are really hit and miss, and the chapter "Towards of Philosophy of Nature" being among the most tedious, and pointless of them all, while the introduction*-being a synthesis of all the content-is the clearest, and most coherent version of the arguments found in this book.

The reader can expect a good explanation of what dialectical naturalism is, the distinction between "first nature" and "second nature" are better laid bare than anywhere else, and the particularities of Murray's "dialectic reason" are explored quite thoroughly-again, quite tediously.

Overall, while many passages are enlightening, others are the exact opposite.This book has done nothing but make me raise more questions about social ecology than it helped answer. And I am not talking about the good kind of questions that push the use of a theory to unexpected situations, but rather the kinds of questions that question the very foundational principles of social ecology.