Catherine Larrère

Jean-Jacques Rousseau on women and citizenship

This paper aims at understanding why Rousseau excluded women from citizenship. Citizenship, for Rousseau, is not a matter of right, not even a matter of behaviour (of how to behave individually to be a good citizen). It is a matter of social condition. How should society be constituted so that there can be citizens? The answer to this question is that there must be women in the private sphere so that there can be citizen in the public sphere. The paper begins with Montesquieus model of the republican condition of women, considers the way Rousseau updated this model, and concludes with the idea, that much more than the male figure of citizenship (which remains a stereotype), the woman, in Rousseau, is the true figure of modernity.

Technology and Nature

It is generally taken as obvious that artificial objects are fabricated, and that the technical process of producing artificial entities is a fabrication. The paradigm of fabrication may serve as a reference for a whole series of technical activities: the production of objects and tools, the construction of buildings, of infrastructures, the synthesis of substances which do not exist in nature. It is the art of making; it applies equally to the art of the craftsman (unique creations) and to industrial fabrication (the serial production of a number of identical objects).

L’écoféminisme ou comment faire de la politique autrement

Ne de la rencontre entre aspirations feministes et luttes ecologiques, liant la critique de la domination de la nature et celle de la domination des femmes, refusant de separer production et reproduction (biologique et sociale), l’ecofeminisme se developpe en une diversite de mouvements, aux Etats-Unis, mais egalement dans differents pays du Sud, qui ont en commun de ne pas mettre la politique au service de la nature, mais de faire de la nature, vue comme une communaute de vie, une politique nouvelle.

Two Philosophies of the Environmental Crisis

One of the most important – and most disturbing – characteristics of philosophical reflection on environmental questions is that there are, in reality, two separate issues involved. One refers to a philosophy of nature and the other to a philosophy of technology. This has led to two forms of well-established and clearly argued reflection, each with its own debates. These two currents have developed independently of each other, and continue to do so, as if the other did not exist. But this duality is no longer tenable. Due to the generalization of the environmental crisis and the emergence of new technologies, it has become impossible to treat nature and technology separately. This paper is thus an attempt at a synthesis of these two fields of environmental ethics.

Des paysages forestiers

When there is discussion on the comparative merits of different forest landscapes, when one hears assessments of the way they are handled or the state that the spontaneous development of stands with a high degree of naturality tends towards, it is commonplace to consider these matters solely from the ecological angle. But the protagonists of these potential controversies would be well-advised to go beyond these exclusive scientific arguments. We have attempted to show that it would be useful for them to also examine the philosophical assumptions on which they rely in considering these issues and to accept a comparison of their aesthetic preferences. This article therefore examines forest landscapes both in the ecological sense of the terms as well as their sensory dimension.