The author has been a pescetarian for 20 years. In this book he reflects on the reasons why he became a pescetarian by considering a range of reasons why one might want to become a vegetarian, a pescetarian or a vegan. The main themes covered are the belief that it is not right to eat animals, the belief that eating meat is bad for one's health, the belief that eating meat results in an increase in violence in human society, and the belief that eating animals is in principle acceptable but that industrialised agriculture is not acceptable.

The German Romantic Friedrich Holderlin developed a unique perspective on the relationship between humankind and the rest of nature. He believed that humanity has a positive role to play in cosmic evolution, and that modernity is the crucial stage in fulfilling this role. In this book the author views Holderlin's ideas from the perspective of the environmental crisis of modernity. From this perspective the environmental crisis has a purpose. This perspective involves an inversion of the traditional notion of causality in the environmental crisis - instead of humans harming nature, it is...

In 2008 the Spinoza-Gesellschaft ran an international prize-essay competition entitled: How Much of Man is Natural? This book contains the winning essay which, in September 2008, was presented to the international conference of the Society in Marburg, Germany. In the preface and introduction the author reflects on the theme and the content of the winning essay. Three years after winning the competition the author decided to re-write the winning essay and this modified version of the winning essay is also included in the book.

The 'problem of consciousness' is widely seen as an intractable mystery - the biggest challenge humanity faces as it seeks to gain a 'complete' understanding of both itself and the non-human world. But what exactly is consciousness? The aim of this book is to help to initiate a change of perspective and to thereby dissolve the seeming intractability of the 'problem of consciousness'.

Most people believe that they know what it means to be 'green'. But do they? This book explores what it means to live a 'green' life for an individual human, and what it means for the human species to be a 'green' species. The conclusion is a provocative one - that at the level of an individual human being 'green' is about the possession of a particular attitude to life and the universe, whilst at the level of the human species being 'green' is about the sustainability of the biosphere. This may sound like an obvious conclusion to reach, but it entails that high levels of human resource use...

There are many ways in which humans can conceptualise the relationship between their species and their surroundings; these surroundings can be taken to be the rest of the life-forms which exist on the Earth, or everything non-human that exists in the universe. In this book I focus on various possible relationships between the human species and the rest of the life-forms that exist (and those that have existed, and those that will exist in the future) on the Earth. Is there no deeply significant and meaningful relationship? Or, is the human species superior in some way? Or, is the human...