Headline: Lecture: Whose Deep Future? Critiquing the moral presumptions of longer-term thinking in Anthropocene discourse

It is common for climate change campaigners to lament the short-term visions of political and cultural imagination, and for environmental philosophers to lament their difficulties in engaging affectively with the lives of future generations. But Anthropocene discourses – in particular their novel temporal frameworks (fusing human time and geological time) – arguably introduce an opposite suspicion. Namely, that we are able to see too far into the future of the planet, and have become enthralled with the ability to imagine with increasing credibility a 'world without us'. In this talk Stefan Skrimshire will discuss some of the foundations, and implications, of such thinking. What impact on moral and political thinking should we expect from describing (with scientific authority) the legacy of human actions hundreds of thousands of years into the future? Does the attempt to re-inscribe human temporality within the 'inhuman' time of geologic life (Yusoff 2011) reaffirm or radically question the philosophical and religious bases for moral responsibility to the future?

About the speaker: Stefan Skrimshire is a lecturer in the School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science, University of Leeds, UK. His work has focussed on the relationship between philosophical and theological articulations of apocalyptic faith and environmental movements. Past research illustrating this includes editing Future Ethics: Climate Change and Apocalyptic Imagination (2010), contributing to Systematic Theology and Climate Change (2014), and contributing to Religion and the Anthropocene (2016). His recent focus has shifted to considering the implications of the Anthropocene and related moral issues such as geoengineering and de-extinction technologies and the construction of long-term nuclear waste depositories. 

Respondent: Whitney Bauman, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Florida International University, USA, current Humboldt Scholar, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität, Jena.

Where? IASS Potsdam, Ballroom, Berliner Str. 130, 14467 Potsdam

When? 9 August 2016, 5 p.m.