Maria Emanuela Galanti

Nonostante il grave ritardo che tutte le democrazie occidentali hanno accumulato nel perseguire i diciassette obiettivi di sviluppo sostenibile (SDG), le istituzioni europee e le organizzazioni del terzo settore hanno recentemente messo in campo un notevole sforzo teorico per proporre dei quadri di riferimento sulla sostenibilità. Un contributo di Maria Emanuela Galanti

First-person sustainability and epistemic independence The paper is a new version of Galanti, 2024, read at the World Congress of Philosophy 2024 (Hermeneutics Section) and already published online on Stultifera Navis. I propose specific criteria necessary for the fulfilment of a 'sustainability in first person' approach and link it to a widespread acknowledgement of the necessity of reclaiming agency through holistic, experiential methods. Hermeneutical action is defined as action accompanied by, and following from, the feeling of truth. I sketch a transformative learning intervention called “Miniatures of Evolution”, a development of the practice “Thinking at the Edge”, devised by the philosopher Eugene T. Gendlin. MoE uses abduction as the process of linking experiential terms to the theoretical term “evolution” to form new hypothesis on what “evolution might be.” Sustainable action is then the process of giving context to the hypothesis to verify it in concrete life situations. I demonstrate the creation of the “naked” universal “trust in the environment” as stemming from and leading to evolutionary “stuff.” In the conclusive remarks I introduce the concept of “epistemic independence” as pointing to a knowing capable of supporting human beings in the ecological crisis. As I will start teaching MoE online in April 2026, I also link to the full program of the course for the readers interested in experiencing my approach.

This essay was originally meant for publication in the Journal of Future Studies. Approved in draft form, it was later rejected by peer reviewers, undoubtedly because of my criticism of the thought of post-humanist author Karen Barad. I am now resubmitting it to Stultiferanavis hoping that my attempt to engage with futurism will be relevant to less ideologically oriented futurists. In it, I present a series of vignettes about my life, forming a spiral from a distant past to the present and then back to a more recent past, the moment of my ecological conversion during the Covid-19 pandemic. In the second part, I offer a conceptualization of the journey that makes it possible to see the spiral as the living context that emerged from the hypotheses ”Evolution = learning from your ancestors” and “Future = a safe space-time where to become brave”. “Holding and letting come” (E.T. Gendlin) is the phenomenological move that can make sense of all of it.