ETHICS AND ENVIRONMENT: A BRIEF RETAKEN OF SOME ELEMENTS OF THE CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHICAL REFLECTION ABOUT NATURE AND TECHNICS

Abstract

This article intends to concentrate itself in the contemporary discussion about ethics and environment which has been done by several authors in contemporary philosophy as Martin Heidegger, Vittorio Hosle, Hans Jonas, Theodor Adorno, François Ost and others under different perspectives. Heidegger does it from the critics and deconstruction of western metphysics. Hosle, by his turn, prefers to analyse the ecological problem from the point of view of political philosophy and law philosophy, rejecting some lines of Heidegger´s reflection. Jonas opts for searching the philosophical and metaphysical fundaments for an ethics for future generations. Adorno proposes a reflection about the domination of nature, its socio-historical developments, seeing in art another perspective which doest not fall into technical domination of nature. Ost orients his reflection from the dialectical perspective. Levinas situates himself opposing those reflections which tries to reconstruct the lost unity between man and nature, seeing this search of unity a tendence to ontological totalitarism. I will try to confront all these autor´s ideas and their propolsals with Levnas´philosophycal project from his key notion of alterity, rising the question whether his propolsal of ethics as first philosophy contains new elements to think an environmental ethics. I will search in all these reflections new principles of action able to build a new attitude of man towards nature and the fundaments for a new environmental ethics.