How animals made us Human. Philosophy and Human Ecology in the work of Paul Shepard.

Abstract

This paper tries to offer an overview of the Human Ecology of Paul Shepard (1925-1996), an author scarcely studied by Spanish-speaking environmental thought. In terms of contemporary Human Ecology, Shepard is defending that, beyond the elementary notions of the evolutionary theory and the sources of feedback from the theory of socio-ecological systems, it is the arts and humanities that give Human Ecology its distinctive features, thus opening the way to the development of what we now call the Environmental Humanities. Shepard emphasizes the interdisciplinary and subversive character of the complex knowledges that emerge from the interaction between the varieties of human thought and those that he himself assigns to the Others, the animals with whom we have coevolved for millions of years. In addition to the task of biocultural conservation, Shepard demands that these environmental knowledges be deployed in an interdisciplinary manner to face the great problems of philosophical thought, such as the contingency of the thinking of the human organism, its meaning and its limits, as well as the urgent need to articulate a philosophy of death as part of life, capable of recognizing the eco-genesis and the radically transitory character of the human mind.