On 27th November 2023 Giulia Battistoni will give a talk at the Department of German and Russian languages of the University of Notre Dame (South Bend, Indiana, USA) on the topic: Human Responsibility Towards Nature: From Ontology to Ethics. Insights from German Romanticism, Hegel and Hans Jonas.

Synopsis:

The talk, developed within the “Marie Skłodowska-Curie Collective Responsibility towards nature and future generation” research project, funded by the European Union, aims at reconstructing central features of a model of living organisms elaborated upon by some Romantic philosophers in the early19^th century and further developed by G.W.F. Hegel. It will be argued that this model is relevant to the contemporary philosophical biology of Hans Jonas, serving as a fruitful ontological basis for an ethical theory of responsibility towards nature, capable of combining biocentric and anthropocentric instances with interesting and original implications for environmental ethics.