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This essay reconsiders Clifford Simak’s Way Station as a nuanced exploration of environmental virtue ethics, challenging the conventional view of Simak’s ideology as conservative. It argues that Simak critiques anthropocentrism, including that in Aldo Leopold’s “Land Ethic,” by advocating for a more authentic ecocentric perspective. Through close analysis, the essay examines how Simak integrates ethical considerations into his portrayal of the ecosphere and his characters’ responses to it, emphasizing the intrinsic value of all beings. Additionally, it explores Simak’s anti-anthropocentrism and alignment with ecofeminism, underscoring his preference for non-human entities. The essay also delves into Simak’s empathy for the “other,” illustrating how he promotes environmental justice and respect for all beings, irrespective of ability, beauty, or corporality. By illuminating Simak’s environmental virtue ethics, this essay contributes to a deeper understanding of how his pastoral science fiction shapes environmental consciousness and promotes ethical engagement with the natural world. (JMB)

With the rise of the scientific authority of neuroscience and recent neurotechnological advances, the understanding of the human being and its future is beginning to undergo a radical change. As a result, a normative and existential vacuum is opening and hopes as well as fears about the future are flourishing. Some philosophers are anticipating a broad neuroscientific disenchantment, sociocultural disruption and a new existential anxiety related to the clash of the neuroscientific and humanistic image of humans. Others are expecting the technological and scientific developments to lead to human enhancement and existential emancipation. In the first part of this commentary, I outline these two contrasting responses to the rise of neurocentricism and non-anthropocentrism. In the second part, I argue that the divide between the old anthropocentric paradigm and the emerging neuroscientific is misconceived and that literature and fictional narrative are particularly illustrative of the possibility of integrating scientific materialism with humanism. I use the contemporary literary-philosophical work The Creative Act by Rick Rubin to show that humanist ideas can indeed cohere with anti-essentialist and neuroscientific notions of personal identity and self and how existential meaning and comfort can be found in a neuroscientifically and deterministically explained world.

Italo Calvino’s The Cosmicomics, despite its pluralistic openness to multiple critical interpretations by various theoretical and conceptual frameworks including post-humanism, science-fiction studies, postmodernism and many more, deals with the fundamental issue of the human’s physical and conceptual inseparability from Nature or the cosmos. The human’s inseparability from the non-humans (including animals, vegetation and inanimate matters) has profound ecological implications. What Calvino establishes in the mentioned text is the human’s inevitable and unconditional inclusion in Nature rather than his self-proclaimed, physical/conceptual exclusion from the same. This is vindicated by the fictional illustrations in the text in which the ‘human’ is posited as a mere member of the ecosystem, and not as its master. In this context, this article endeavours to explore and analyze the said ecological implications of the mentioned work in the light of some the established ecological theories and postulations.