Peter speaks to the philosopher Ted Toadvine about a wide range of environmental themes and issues. Toadvine specialises in environmental ethics and contemporary European philosophy. His new book titled The Memory of the World: Deep Time, Animality, and Eschatology explores the ethical and ecological implications of deep time from a phenomenological perspective and is available now via University of Minnesota Press.

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Timestamps:

(00:00) Introduction

(02:44) Episode begins

(09:57) Why Toadvine wrote The Memory of the World

(16:56) Toadvine’s earliest experiences of deep time

(23:27) Reconciling humanity and the natural environment

(40:57) Technology and nature

(46:00) The problem with the Anthropocene

(58:10) The problem with biodiversity

(01:05:52) The relationship between nature and language

(01:10:12) What is eco-phenomenology?

(01:15:10) Nature as the horizon of all things

(01:20:07) “Nature loves to hide”

(01:26:08) Edmund Husserl’s description of the natural world as a “correlate of consciousness”

(01:31:48) “The sun did not exist before human beings”

(01:42:45) The ethical problems of global sustainability

(01:52:23) The relationship between deep time and embodiment

(02:03:43) The animals that haunt our humanity from within

(02:20:38) Derrida at the end of the world

(02:29:06) The cultural obsession with doomsday

(02:36:39) The phenomenological perspective of the end of the world

(02:47:20) A phenomenology of the elements

(02:52:04) Art and the elements