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@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.