Humanities in the Anthropocene: The Crisis of an Enduring Kantian Fable

This essay revisits a critical distinction Kant made in 1786 between moral and animal lives of humans, as the distinction has been central, the essay argues, in distinguishing the human from the physical and the biological sciences. The essay further argues that human understanding of as well as many academic-policy responses to anthropogenic climate change may be read as a symptom of a deep crisis the distinction has fallen into. It ends with a discussion of Bruno Latour’s work as providing some important resources for thinking forward through this crisis.