12:42 p.m.
We are pleased to announce that on Friday, May 23 at 5.30pm (CET), Vincent Lam (Bern) will
give the talk Modelling the Anthropocene and its Boundaries as part of the Lugano
Philosophy Colloquia Spring 2025 organised by the Institute of Philosophy (ISFI) at USI.
This hybrid talk will take place in Room Multiuso FTL Building (USI west campus) and
online via Zoom. If you are interested in joining online, please write to
events.isfi(a)usi.ch.
Here is the abstract of the talk:
Climate change is increasingly understood as one aspect of a larger story involving
disruptive human interferences in fundamental, life support planetary processes.
Navigating this new regime of drastic, human-induced global environmental changes requires
forms of scientific knowledge that seriously address both the planetary scale as well as
the deep entanglement of ‘natural’ and ‘social’ processes at the heart of what can be
called the ‘Anthropocene challenge’. In this context, Earth system science (ESS) has
emerged as a new scientific paradigm with the ambition to provide a unified understanding
of the Earth system, explicitly including the interacting human dynamics. By framing
possible societal responses in a planetary perspective, ESS involves fundamental normative
and value dimensions whose wide-ranging ramifications are hard to fully grasp. In this
context, this presentation will address the difficulties that the planetary scale of the
ESS framework raises for the standard philosophy of science discussions on value
management in science. Building on the social science and STS scholarship, the aim is to
lay the ground for the development of new forms of value management that are characterized
by careful attention to power structures and epistemic injustices. Specific attention will
be given to the recent entanglement of justice considerations within the ESS framework of
planetary boundaries in view of identifying “safe and just planetary boundaries”, in order
to establish to what extent and in what sense exactly it can be understood as a form of
justice-oriented scientific knowledge, and what the epistemic limitations and constraints
can be.
For more information: https://www.usi.ch/en/feeds/31751