%0 Journal Article
%T Whether Earthquakes are Loveable: Knowing Nature in the Wake of Disaster
%A Molly Sturdevant
%J Perspectives : International Postgraduate Journal of Philosophy
%D 2012
%I 
%X This essay examines the question of whether and how philosophical thinking is equipped to countenance in a meaningful way what for Spinoza is nature¡¯s brutally manifest indifference to whether one likes it or not. Nature¡¯s indifference to human pleasure, as well as its uniquely unsettling challenge for conceptualization, must be investigated if nature is to be a meaningful category for environmental ethics. In search of a way to conceptualize nature as it is, I take up an explication of key passages from Spinoza¡¯s Ethics, and thereby maintain that earthquakes are ¡°lovable.¡± I hold this position to be true for two reasons. In brief, earthquakes areontologically contiguous with the same power and force whereby all entities are maintained; secondly, love, understood intellectually and through a Spinozistic lens, is that modality of relating which understands power primordially and is able to act ethically without belaboring judgments of pleasure or pain, or even holding nature at a distance in order to revere it as something to save.
%K Spinoza
%K the Ethics
%K Deus sive Natura
%K environmental ethics
%K critical theory
%K climate change
%K (critiques of) deep ecology
%U http://www.ucd.ie/philosophy/perspectives/resources/issue4/Perspectives%20Vol4_Molly%20Sturdevant_Whether%20Earthquakes%20are%20Lovable-%20Knowing%20Nature%20in%20the%20Wake%20of%20Disaster.pdf