From air pollution to climate change and pandemics, we know we are both vulnerable and mutually interdependent in our reliance on air and breathing for survival. Breath is also central to many world religions as an expression of our spiritual nature. This lecture offers a new paradigm for thinking about environmental problems in the humanities by placing air and breathing at the center of our philosophy.
Lenart Škof is Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies and Head of the Institute for Philosophical and Religious Studies at the Science and Research Centre Koper (Slovenia). He also serves as a Dean of Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis faculty at the Alma Mater Europaea University (Ljubljana, Slovenia). He is an author of several books, among them God in Post-Christianity: An Elemental Philosophical Theology (SUNY Press, 2024, forthcoming), Antigone’s Sisters: On the Matrix of Love (SUNY Press, 2021) and Breath of Proximity: Intersubjectivity, Ethics and Peace (Springer, 2015). His main research interests are in elemental philosophy, philosophical theology, and contemporary feminist philosophy and theology.
Sponsored by the Global Environmental Studies program.