Radical Ecology in the Face of the Anthropocene Extinction

John A. Smith has taught at Goldsmiths College, University of London; Lancaster University; and Greenwich University. He is a sociologist and a painter trained at the Royal College of Art. He is interested in sociological theory, philosophy and visual culture, and has published in all of these areas.Anna Wilson is a transdisciplinary researcher with a background in nuclear physics, currently working in the School of Education at the University of Glasgow.

• Introduction PART 1: A radical ecological philosophy 1 Reforming the philosophy of the Enlightenment: Chance as a second-order phenomenon and post-humanism 2 Auto-eco-organisation as ontology: The sciences of emergence3 Auto-exo-reference as epistemology: A biosemiotics approach 4 Materialist neo-Darwinism and its discontents: Debates in the modern synthesis; the ecology of physical and semantic causality; end-directedness and its consequences for an ecological social science 5 The evolutionary ecology of the social: The adaptive unconscious, the mammalian emotions, the significance of approximation end-directed dynamics; social systems as differentiated, adaptive dynamicsPART 2: The Anthropocene extinction 6 Summary of Part 1 and methodology for Part 2 7 Three case studies 8 The Anthropocene extinction: Explicit evidence and implicit epistemology 9 Global governance and its discontents "in practice": Radically incompatible perspectives: political, economic, cultural and scientific conflicts 10 In place of a conclusion: Imperatives and ambiguities Bibliography Index