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Cosmologies of the Anthropocene
Vetlesen's 2019 extension of his moral philosophy into environmental ethics — arguing that humanity's relationship to nature is the domain where the costs of anesthetized moral perception become most visibly catastrophic.
Cosmologies of the Anthropocene: Panpsychism, Animism, and the Limits of Posthumanism (Routledge, 2019) argues that the environmental crisis is, at its root, a crisis of perception. Modern humans cannot see the suffering of the non-human world — the mass extinctions, the soil depletion, the oceanic acidification — because the philosophical cosmology they inherit has trained them to see nature as resource rather than subject. Vetlesen's response is not a revival of animism but a rigorous phenomenological argument that vulnerability extends beyond the human and that the numbing of moral perception has already produced, at civilizational scale, the catastrophe his earlier work on evil anticipated.
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The book closes the arc of Vetlesen's career: from Perception, Empathy, and Judgment through Evil and Human Agency through A Philosophy of Pain to the extension of the framework to the environmental domain. The structural claim is consistent: moral perception requires vulnerability, vulnerability is attenuated by specific social and