VARIOUS HUMAN TYPES FACING THE UNKNOWN

On the dialectics of human evolution

From Dilthey to Mead and Heidegger: Systematic and Historical Relations MATTHIASJUNG FOR TODAY'S READER, G. H. Mead's lectures on Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century offer a surprise: Mead, despite having attended his lectures from 1889 to 1891, does not mention the name of Wilhelm Dilthey, who nowadays is regarded as one of the classical authors of nineteenth-century philosophy. Mead's lectures lack any sign of awareness concerning the hermeneutic tradition, represented by such names as Friedrich Schlegel, Schleiermacher, Droysen and, of course, Dilthey. Nevertheless it is, as I would like to show in the following pages, quite obvious that Mead's own philosophical conception shows some striking parallels with Dilthey's thought, which can be explained partly through direct influence, partly through the similarity of the questions both tried to answer. For Mead's missing reference to the mentioned tradition, I see two complementary explanations. Firstly, the philosophical importance of the hermeneutic tradition in nineteenth-century philosophy was mainly a retrospective matter. Only after 1927, when Martin Heidegger published Being and Time, did philosophical interest in hermeneutics begin; and then it took thirty-three years more till Hans-Georg Gadamer's Truth and Method brought about a historical interest in the development of hermeneutic thought. Secondly, Mead's own passion for the development of science may have forced him to neglect these philosophical movements, which seemed to resist the autocracy of (natural) science. Wilhelm Dilthey's thought, especially around the year 189o, can systematically be interpreted as a common starting-point for two of the most important directions of contemporary philosophy: pragmatism and hermeneutics. It is but a small exaggeration to say that G. H. Mead drew out the pragmatic, Martin Heidegger the hermeneutic consequences of Dilthey's concept of [661 ] 662 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 33:4 OCTOBER ~995 Seelenleben, understood as a "best~indige Wechselwirkung zwischen unserem Eigenleben und dem Milieu. ''1 Mead's phase-model of acting, his whole idea of understanding meaning as the result of a social process, are paralleled and partly anticipated by Dilthey, as is Heidegger's conception of Dasein as "beingin -the-world" and his attempt to understand the inner historicity of life.2 In pointing this out, I do not want to claim that Mead was conscious of the systematic relation of his theories to Dilthey's work; nevertheless I will argue that Dilthey's ideas may have served as a source of inspiration and, furthermore , that this inspiration was made possible through some important similarities in the systematic architecture of both hermeneutics and pragmatism.3 I begin by working out the historical dimension, which Hans Joas characterized as "Meads biographische Abkunft von Dilthey"4 (section l). After that, I will sketch Dilthey's philosophical position around 189o in order to show how he works to transform the German tradition of "philosophy of consciousness" into a new concept of interaction between the life-processes of detranscendentalized subjects and their environment (section 2). Having done this, I will be ready to discuss the parallels between Mead's pragmatic approach to the life-process and Dilthey's work (section 3). Finally, the early Heidegger's and Mead's transformations of "philosophy of consciousness" will briefly be interpreted as different ways of overcoming the inherent problems of Dilthey 's attempt (section 4). Between April 23, 1889 and October ~4, 1891 G. H. Mead was registered at the Humboldt-University of Berlin.5 During this period Wilhelm Dilthey, who had come from Breslau to Berlin in 1882, gave the following lectures: "Geschichte der neueren Philosophie"; "Geschichte und System der P/idagogik "; "Logik und Erkenntnistheorie"; "Psychologie als Erfahrungswissen- ' Wilhelm Dilthey, DichterischeEinbildungskraft und Wahnsinn, in GesammelteSchriften, Bd. VI (Stuttgart/G6ttingen: Teubner/Vandenhoeck &Ruprecht, 1962),95. 9In Sein und Zeit (cited from the 15th edition, Tfibingen: Niemeyer, 1979),Heidegger refers frequently to Dilthey: 46, 47, 2o5, 2~ 249, 376f-, 385, 397-4o4 9The two most important sources concerning his early reception of Dilthey'swork are the lecture from the summer semester of 192o,Phi~nomenologieder Anschauung und des Ausdrucks, ed. C. Strube (Frankfurt: Klostermann , 1993) and the "Kasseler Vortr~ge," given in 1925 under the title "Wilhelm Diltheys Forschungsarbeit und der...

The article analyzes two of the most important teachings in the world of religious-philosophical and socio-political thought — humanism and conservatism. It is emphasized that the doctrine of humanism, which arose in the XIV–XVI centuries. initially opposed the traditional religious and philosophical teachings of European peoples, primarily Christianity. As a religious philosophy, humanism served as a tool for the destruction of traditional societies and traditional religions and at the same time served as a methodological basis for creating an ideal society of universal justice. In the XVI–XIX centuries. The religious and philosophical attitudes of humanism have become the methodological basis of all the main religious, philosophical, ethical, political, economic, and aesthetic teachings of Western European civilization. The humanistic attitudes in these teachings took various forms — from the most radical (Marxism, anarchism) to liberal and protective (Hegelianism). However, in the XX — early XXI century. humanism has become a tool of the leading so-called "civilized" states, with which they destroy undesirable state regimes and traditional values of peoples who do not fit into the newly created "world order". Russian Russian thought tradition, in turn, was initially traditionalist and conservative, moreover, Russian religious and philosophical teachings were markedly different from those of Western European ones. The article shows the history of the birth and development of the Russian traditionalist-conservative tradition from the XI to the XXI centuries. It is concluded that in the works of modern Russian researchers at the beginning of the XXI century, the basic principles of the traditionalist-conservative methodology were formulated in the new historical conditions in which the current human community exists. The term "Russian chranitelstvo" is proposed to designate this kind of methodology in modern Russian socio-humanities. A new understanding of the traditionalist-conservative approach to the analysis of the historical development of man and society makes it possible to reflect and show the civilizational specifics of Russia, the complexity, multidimensional nature and interdependence of those social, spiritual, religious, political and economic processes that determined Russian statehood, as well as to offer an alternative, and, most importantly, a perspective view of the current state and the future of our state and people.

As I began to read Hazel E. Barnes' autobiography, The Story I Tell Myself,1 when it was published recently, my first impression, in addition to the very real pleasure of reading it, was the thought: here is a perfect book for undergraduate women philosophy majors. For I have noticed throughout my many years of teaching that, while I often have bright talented majors of both sexes, women, more often than men, seem to be unsure of their ability; they express doubts about their aptitude in regard to a future career; they take criticisms too seriously. One might, perhaps, sum up their attitude in one sentence: young women take philosophy personally. Now I do not want to deny that young men might have similar tendencies, which they do not express as often, because of cultural expectations of how males ought to act. In fact, I think that the story Hazel Barnes tells herself, along with other stories she has told throughout her career, has value for all of us because of her unique and interesting philosophical position. In this essay I will outline my conception of several important aspects of Hazel Barnes' philosophy. In my view her central philosophical discussion emphasizes the notion of a singular universal, which she prefers to call "a unique universal" (Story, xii), i.e., a conscious existing pour-soi who makes free choices and is, therefore, self-creating and self-determining in the situation in which she finds herself. In the first part of my essay I will outline some of Barnes' themes concerning the situation of the singular universal. This is preliminary to my major discussion of her philosophical notion of the free self in part two. In these sections I will refer to a book she wrote in the late nineteen-sixties, An Existentialist Ethics,2 as well as to brief passages in some of her other books, essays, and translations of Sartre. Finally, in my third and last section, I will sum up the major points of Barnes' philosophical position and discuss, at least briefly, her contribution to American philosophy and to feminism. My last section has implications for some of the strong criticisms of the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre voiced by many contemporary feminists, including some of those whose primary interest is Simone de Beauvoir's philosophy. I have heard Margaret A. Simons, the dean of Beauvoir scholars in the United States, say that she hates that man, and at times she refuses even to say his name. I think that it is natural that early work on Beauvoir as a philosopher in her own right would take place from a vantage point hostile to Sartre; after all, the energy necessary to pull one philosopher out from under another one,3 with whom she has chosen to be buried, requires vigorous effort if not actual violence. As time goes by, however, I think that we will begin to appreciate a more positive influence from Jean-Paul Sartre. Much of human existence results from mere chance, but I do not believe that it can be an accident that one of the greatest woman philosophers of the twentieth-century, Simone de Beauvoir, and one of our most important contemporary American woman philosophers, Hazel E. Barnes, could claim the same man as a major influence on their philosophical lives, unless there were some value for women in that man's philosophy. In the end I will suggest that when Beauvoir and Barnes applied the philosophy of Sartre to their own lived experience, each one created an original, unique interpretation of existentialism. I confess that this is the first time that I have ever written a paper on the philosophy of a living person who can actually reply to my remarks. Like J. Alfred Prufrock, I anticipate that she might say "That is not what I meant at all./ That is not it, at all."4 My terror in this situation is mitigated only by my joy that Hazel Barnes is here with us, and my hope that we will have the pleasure of her philosophical conversation for many years to come. Since Sartre claimed that he never learned anything at all from any critic or commentator, I console myself with the thought that if this paper inspires a similar judgment, at least I will be in company most excellent. …

Imagining our selves: another step for sf film-philosophy Greg Singh Steven M. Sanders, ed., The Philosophy of Science Fiction Film. Lexington: The UP of Kentucky, 2008. 232 pp. us$35.00 (hbk).Questions about space, place, time and that thing we tend to refer to as 'me' stir the imagination in myriad ways. Sf film is a powerfully expressive framework for the imagination, and philosophising can be understood as the exercise of imagination through method. Sf film is often concerned with the nature of humanity, what it is to be a human and what it means to be a particular human - themes fundamental to the genre and to philosophy, both of which also pose generative and enabling 'what if?' questions. The Philosophy of Science Fiction Film contributes towards an understanding of how sf provides materials for philosophical thinking. In this sense, the book is a useful, original and focused intervention in film studies that partakes of the more general academic movement towards the development of an interdisciplinary film-philosophy.Steven M. Sanders' introduction indicates that there is a general consensus among his contributors as to what constitutes sf (and, by extension, sf film and television), and the essays take a rather canonical approach to the genre. There is not much in the way of thinking through a philosophy of genre: as a classificatory or taxonomic system; as a phenomenon of expectation and recognition for various stakeholder groups (producers, consumers, critics, publishers and so on); or genre's relationship to time and personal identity (as found in, for example, fan cultures). For example, while Sanders' contribution indicates the noirish conventions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Siegel US 1956) and Deborah Knight and George McKnight's essay acknowledges the noirishness of Blade Runner (Scott US/Hong Kong 1982) and Dark City (Proyas Australia/ US 1998), they go no further than that. Sanders's introduction, itself surprisingly critical in its evaluation of the rest of the contents, implies an all-too-easy delimitation of Hollywood history, its periods and tropes, particularly in relation to the idea of an sf genre. An essay on the philosophical implications (and paradoxes) of intertextuality, for example, would have provided the opportun- ity to unpack the periodisation tendencies in film history and historiography, allowing a more organic relationship to emerge between genre, time and the political economics of industrial sf filmmaking.Knight and McKnight focus on the connections between memories, emotions and desires in Dark City and Blade Runner as fundamental to the understanding of character motivation through sense of self. The question that popular criticism most consistently asks of the latter film is: is Deckard an android? If so, his memories are implanted and are not his own. Yet this does not stop him from being a reasoning, wilful subject, nor a desiring one. The logic here is sound, even as several of the premises ostensibly offered by popular commentary on the film come unstuck: Deckard might as well be an android, stuck as he seems to be, in a perpetual present. After all, Deckard's alienation is an archetypical form of alienation, directly following Jean-Jacques Rousseau and G.W.F. Hegel as a discrepancy between his own sense of being (he suspects that he may actually be a replicant) and his existence as a replicant exterminator. As Sanders points out, however, such a state of perpetual presence would make relationships impossible to sustain over time: the psychoid nature of perpetual presence is matched by what Giuliana Bruno describes as the 'schizoid' nature of Blade Runner's Los Angeles, a 'ramble city' or postmodern patchwork of memories from different pasts that could not possibly have co-existed (and yet here they are in modern LA).Shai Biderman's discussion of personhood and identity over time in Total Recall (Verhoeven US 1990) is an example of how to philosophise concisely and economically, without cheapening the line of enquiry or talking down to the non-specialist reader. …

An early stage in the development of phenomenology, as a matter of fact, is considered, which completes a long, foldable and richly planned process, within the framework of which a new philosophical methodology was formed. Among the concepts of phenomenology, the concept of intentionality is especially distinguished, as it is not only the basic characteristic of all mental acts of a person, but also a rethinking prompting ontology of wisdom. The basic provisions of the phenomenological theory of information are not in themselves an intentional principle, which changes the traditional for that hour the understanding of information as a mental interpretation of speeches. F. Brentano's position forces us to talk about certain ontological levels that are associated with a greater or lesser obviousness of real or mental objects. The general thesis proposed here is that phenomenology is not the creation of a single, even brilliant, thinker, but is a doctrine that completes a rather long, complex and multifaceted process within which a new philosophical position was formed. In this sense, it can be argued that the emergence of the phenomenological method was prepared by the entire development of European philosophy, in each stage of which one can find points of formation of the phenomenological method or points of thematic intersection with phenomenology. In this respect, phenomenology is not just a philosophical «invention», another» «system», but a doctrine that emerged at the intersection of rational and empirical theories of New European philosophy, starting in the nineteenth century. At an early stage of phenomenology's development, an important conceptual basis for building a scientific psychology that wants to consider mental phenomena in any meaningful way is revealed. This basis is contained in the concept of intentionality, which is fundamental to the construction and development of phenomenological discourse. However, it would be a mistake to treat intentional objects as products of the imagination or simple empirical data that psychology usually deals with. In a certain sense, an intentional object is not a psychological phenomenon, but one of the constituent elements of the original ontology, a material, a brick, which consistently makes up any ontological structure. Thus, already at the stage of the formation of the phenomenological doctrine, the contours and priorities of a new philosophy were determined, which positioned itself as a philosophy of consciousness and should be read as a prerequisite for the construction of a fundamental ontology.

Paul Ricoeur was one of the foremost interpreters and translators of Edmund Husserl's philosophy. These nine essays present Ricoeur's interpretation of the most important of Husserl's writings, with emphasis on his philosophy of consciousness rather than his work in logic. In Ricoeur's philosophy, phenomenology and existentialism came of age and these essays provide an introduction to the Husserlian elements which most heavily influenced his own philosophical position.

The image of the Peng bird, which opens the Zhuangzi text, is not the product of metaphysical reasoning. An inspiring example of soaring up and going beyond, the image is used to broaden the outlook of the small mind; its function is thus more therapeutic than instructional. With its rich poetic and experiential content, the image of the Peng refuses to be reduced to an abstract concept, or a mere signifier of certain philosophical position. Misreading of the image results from any attempt to accurately “size up” its philosophical implication by measuring it quantitatively against a spectrum of positions and values. To see only the superficial “inconsistencies” in Zhuangzi’s argument and to read the wind under the Peng’s wings as a handicap that it needs to overcome in order to embark on its “free and easy wandering” is, in the name of logic and “consistency,” to ignore the big picture Zhuangzi presents.

Jean-Luc Godard: The Cinema in Doubt

Reviewed by: The Golden Age of Indian Buddhist Philosophy by Jan Westerhoff Constance Kassor Review of Jan Westerhoff The Golden Age of Indian Buddhist Philosophy Oxford University Press, 2018, 352 pages. ISBN: 9780198732662 Anyone who has engaged seriously with the academic study of Buddhism knows that Buddhist philosophical traditions are difficult to characterize. One must simultaneously consider historical and intellectual contexts in order to make sense of the development of Buddhist philosophy. Jan Westerhoff's The Golden Age of Indian Buddhist Philosophy successfully does just this; it presents a survey of Indian Buddhist thought as it evolved from the beginning of the Common Era through the sixth century CE, simultaneously considering intellectual and historical developments. The book focuses on these organizing principles "while ensuring that an informative account of the history of Buddhist thought emerges through their joint presence" (11). As a survey of Indian Buddhist thought within a relatively limited time-frame, this book would be appropriate reading in a graduate-level course or an advanced undergraduate seminar on Indian Buddhist philosophy. The book is clear and easy to read but presupposes some knowledge of general trends in Indian Buddhist thought in the first millennium CE. The book is divided into a general introduction and four main chapters, detailing the history and development of Abhidharma, Madhyamaka, Yogācāra, and what Westerhoff calls "The School of Din. nāga and Dharmakīrti," respectively. The introduction sets up the development of Buddhist [End Page 183] philosophy as a "game," based on arguments, sacred texts, meditative practices, and historical background. Westerhoff explains, "Arguments correspond to the techniques players use in the game, while thinkers may be compared to the players, and their debates the games played. The influence of meditative techniques may be compared (somewhat crudely) to the inner states of the players and how these affect their playing techniques, while the historical background functions like the condition of the pitch, the temperature, humidity, and so on" (2–3). Westerhoff's aim throughout the book is to take all of these factors into account in order to present a comprehensive overview of the development and major philosophical concerns of these four schools of Indian Buddhist thought. Unlike other textbooks that might treat the advent of these four schools strictly chronologically, Westerhoff examines each tradition through multiple lenses, resulting in important insights about the ways in which we might understand these schools and reflect on their major philosophical concerns. When explaining the Mahāsaṃgika school in the chapter on Abhidharma, for example, he notes that "many of the key positions of later Mahāyāna schools are already present in the Mahāsaṃgika theses, underlining the fact that the development of Buddhist philosophy is not characterized by single-handed innovations of autonomous thinkers, but by gradual shifts in emphasis on particular concepts, shifts which, in the fullness of time, can lead to very distinct philosophical positions, but which proceed by never losing sight of anchoring their innovations in the continuity of the Buddhist tradition, thereby attempting to underline their authoritativeness as the genuine word of the Buddha" (49). In other words, this is not just a history textbook; Westerhoff presents the development of these four schools in a somewhat chronological manner, while also exploring each school's philosophical implications. In doing so, he manages to look both forward and backward in time, so to speak, presenting readers with new ways of thinking about the developments of these seemingly distinct schools of thought. The first chapter focuses on Abhidharma and begins by providing some context for this tradition in terms of its characterization as the "word of the Buddha" (buddhavacana), even though it is widely acknowledged that the Abhidharma texts were not spoken by the historical Buddha himself. It then details five key subschools within this tradition: Mahāsaṃgika, Theravāda, Pudgalavāda, Sarvāstivāda, and Sautrāntika. Each of these subschools is examined from both historical and intellectual perspectives, providing a general overview of their views. It is worth noting that Westerhoff does not cite extensively from primary sources throughout this book; as such, this book would do well in a classroom when paired with primary sources...

The aim of this article is to contribute theoretically to the development of a cultural psychological, i.e. dialogical and distributed, understanding of stress. First we challenge established cognitivist notions of stress and discuss philosophical and epistemological implications tied to this perspective. Then we introduce a dialogical, distributed and situated understanding of stress and rewrite central concepts from cognitive stress research such as appraisal and coping. This new orientation is related to a recent metaphysics of mind, according to which mental states and processes are embedded in and possibly even extend into the environment. This philosophical position is known as externalism and holds that the mind needs to be understood not just by intrinsic mental features such as physiological or cognitive processes, but also in light of what either occurs or exists outside the organism. With reference to empirical examples, we argue that this framework can contribute to a new understanding of the situated and distributed nature of stress.

In this article, I examine the idea of the portrait from two viewpoints: the ‘classical’ portrait as it appears in Jean-Luc Nancy’s post-phenomenological philosophy, and the recent self-portrait photographs or ‘selfies’ on social media. First, I consider the portrait’s value in Nancy’s theories of art: for him, portraits hold an important position among the genres of visual art, since they present themselves as distinctive images by extracting the innermost force of the portrayed person. Secondly, I take up the philosophical and political implications of Nancy’s notion of the portrait vis-a-vis the contemporary selfie culture. I suggest that, instead of emphasizing the model’s singularity as traditional artistic portraits do, the flow of selfies tends to create similarity. I begin by clarifying Nancy’s paradoxical claim that the human portrait may resemble a person only on the condition of not representing him or her. After this, I inquire about the philosophical position of selfies as constructed portraits that make visible the absence of the self. However, as I argue, they do this in a sense that differs from Nancy’s account of the portrait. As a result, I propose that the repetition and circulation of selfies has remarkably changed our view on the significance and, finally, the ontology of the portrait.

Beauvoir and Sartre as Public Intellectuals in 2022 William L. McBride I have been fortunate enough to be able to reflect in print at least twice, in recent years, on works by Simone de Beauvoir that, written around or shortly past the middle of the last century, reference what was then the future in interesting ways—and it should be recalled that an orientation toward the future is of central importance to the ambiguous ethic that Beauvoir developed in Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté, as it is in the Sartrean ontology which places so much emphasis on “the project.” A chapter of mine in an anthology dealing with philosophical aspects of Beauvoir’s novel, The Mandarins, concluded by speculating what those Mandarins would find surprising and what they would not if they were suddenly to reawaken in the early twenty-first century (McBride, “Conflict”). And in a more recent chapter of a volume co-edited by Nancy Bauer, A Companion to Simone de Beauvoir, in which I discuss and compare Beauvoir’s travelogues on America and China, I concluded with an implicit lament for those two worlds that she had explored so well when they were younger (McBride, “Postwar World”). Of course, the background reality to these works, as well as to many of the essays that Jean-Paul Sartre wrote during the same postwar period, was the Cold War. Especially in The Mandarins there is a strong streak of pessimism, which is to some extent in contradiction with Beauvoir’s assertion at the beginning of Pour une morale and Sartre’s in L’Existentialisme est un humanisme that, contrary to the claims of its critics on the Catholic Right, existentialism is a philosophy of hope. (It is not, I think, by chance that Beauvoir gave the name L’Espoir to the journal edited by her protagonist in The Mandarins, Henri, which [End Page 884] folded toward the end of the novel.) There was good reason to be depressed about the world scene during the late 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s, with the real threat of nuclear war looming large. Indeed, who of those who lived through an episode of the mid-Cold War period, the Cuban Missile Crisis—the postmortem analysis of which by Robert McNamara and other major actors confirmed my own feeling at the time, scoffed at by some—can forget that it was a near thing? By now, the Cold War in its old form is a thing of the past. So why are so many of us still not feeling very good about the world scene? If resurrection were a real possibility, what might Beauvoir and Sartre say if they were to be brought back to the world stage? And what is it that existentialism more generally, however difficult it is to define, can contribute to illuminating our situation? These are the questions I shall attempt to answer in the next few pages. This essay is a small part of what I wrote about the imaginary resurrected Mandarins reawakened in today’s Paris. True, they would be surprised by some obvious things, notably the elimination of the Soviet Bloc. Nevertheless, I wrote, “they would feel very much at home. They would hear everyone talking about American imperialism; they would hear references to the announced prospect of an endless war; and if they were to read newspaper articles about the United States they would see that creeping fascism in the form of increased police state tactics (suppression of rights, vast augmentation of surveillance procedures, a ‘criminal justice’ system that houses one-quarter of the world’s prisoners drawn from less than 5% of its population, etc.), effective control of major media outlets by right-wing forces, strong encouragement of ‘patriotic’ nationalism, and so on, were the order of the day in that country” (McBride, “Conflict” 44). So, presumably, they would still regard existentialism and “résistentialisme,” as Beau-voir’s character Anne puts it, to be appropriate, humanistic attitudes to adopt in face of the diverse threats to humanity posed by a sizable segment of humanity itself. Before proceeding further with this nostalgic exercise of my imagination, I should say something about what the two...

The mark of man on the surface of the earth is as old as the early beginning of mankind. The history of humanity may be envisaged as a struggle against its environment, involving a progressive liberation from the local, natural conditions and the gradual enslavement of the living world by man’s own inventions. Biological motivations explain this tendency. But, as in every human activity, cultural traditions and beliefs encourage us to modify our simple actions and reactions. A philosophical attitude is the primary determining factor of any human attitude. Western philosophies emphasize the supremacy of man over the rest of the world, which only exists to serve him— or so they contend. Since the time of Francis Bacon and Descartes early in the seventeenth century, we have been convinced that we are the masters and possessors of nature. The prodigious progress of the sciences seems to give us the right to do what we want and so to confirm this philosophical attitude. Therefore, it is no wonder that protection of wildlife and sound management of the surface of the earth according to biological laws, did not receive any support from this western philosophy.

The Haida Salmon Restoration Corporation's (HSRC) 2012 ocean fertilisation experiment introduced a controversial geoengineering technology to the First Nations village of Old Massett on the islands of Haida Gwaii in British Columbia. Local debate centred on conflicting interpretations of the potential environmental impacts of the project and on the Corporation's attempts to align its public brand with the Haida name and proud identity of environmental stewardship. More broadly, the controversy illustrated long‐standing arguments about the desirability and feasibility of ocean fertilisation as a geoengineering response to the threat of anthropogenic climate change. Using theHSRCcase, this paper reports a novel situated study of public perceptions of geoengineering that combines ethnographic engagement with Q‐methodology. Three distinct viewpoints on ocean fertilisation are revealed, shaped by the unique confluence of social, political, cultural and environmental circumstances of Haida Gwaii. These viewpoints on ocean fertilisation reflect different ideas held by local residents about planetary limits, about the way humans attain knowledge of natural systems and about the human values of, and responsibilities toward, nature. Although the revealed viewpoints are constructed through contextually specific local meanings, they engage with debates that emerge across a range of other geoengineering technologies and which reflect contested philosophical positions visible in wider environmental management and restoration discourses. The case of ocean fertilisation off the islands of Haida Gwaii may therefore provide a useful benchmark for reflexivity in geoengineering governance. Our case study shows that engaging with the situated beliefs and values that underpin human attitudes and responses towards novel geoengineering technologies is asine qua nonfor good governance. Even so, our results suggest such technologies will likely always be contested given the diverse ways in which people understand human relations with the non‐human world.