Theory of the Philosophical Decision

Abstract

At the end of the preceding chapter I ventured the thesis that the environmental philosophies and theologies discussed do not think ecologically, that is, their thought is not ecological, because the structure of their thought makes it such that they are unable to think ecologically. In this chapter I will develop this idea by exploring the structural relationship that philosophy and theology have with the sciences, which includes ecology of course, and argue that it is the self-sufficient structure of philosophy and theology that is responsible for this inability. Part II will focus on the work of French thinker François Lamelle who has, for the last four decades, developed a theory he calls non-philosophy or, more recently, non-standard philosophy. In Laruelle’s view there is an intractable war between philosophies and between philosophy and other regional knowledges, in particular science. The war is intractable because, by the criteria of intellectual labor, each form of thought operates or works. John Mullarkey discusses this in his own reading of Laruelle, showing how particular forms of thought that claim to be at odds with one another nevertheless all still have some level of success sufficient to allow them to believe these forms of thoughts should persist, that they are right and helpful. Yet, the respective metadiscourse, in our case the metaphilosophy or metatheology, “imply that only one should work—their own.