Brett Buchanan, Laurentian University: On Nature Fakers and the Trail of a Philosopher-Ethologist
[EEHN seminar]
Writing at the turn of the 20th century, Canadian artist and naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton developed and helped pioneer a particular form of nature-writing that gave voice and agency to wild animals. Despite the popularity of his lovable tales, however, and even in some ways because of them, he was not an uncontroversial figure, and he found himself at the heart of what has become known as the “nature fakers” controversy, a public argument on the legitimacy of animals as agents that cast certain forms of writing about animals as intellectual hoaxes. In this paper I look at how philosophizing about animal agency today re-opens this old debate, and how philosophical ethology can help us create a space for thinking and writing with animals, particularly in our time of environmental crises.
Brett Buchanan is the Director of the School of the Environment, and Associate Professor of Philosophy, at Laurentian University, Ontario, Canada. His teaching and research centers on the intersections of the environmental humanities, contemporary continental philosophy, and animal studies. Brett sits on a number of scholarly boards and committees, including Wilfrid Laurier University Press's Environmental Humanities book series, Environmental Humanities journal, and Rowman & Littlefield International's Ecotones book series. In 2018 he was the President of the Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada (ALECC) (and now past-President for 2019), and he has previously served as Secretary and V-P of The Society for Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture (EPTC). At Laurentian he is a founding core member of the research Centre for Evolutionary Ecology and Ethical Conservation (CEEEC), and he has led and co-organized several colloquiums/workshops, including Thinking Extinction (Sudbury, 2013) and Field Philosophy (Paris, 2017).