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Introduction: Avowing Fragility
Summary
Despite its title referencing fragility, this paper is a work of philosophy and social theory examining how contemporary academia approaches questions of environmental uncertainty and modernity — not microplastic pollution. It discusses concepts from Husserl, Wittgenstein, and sociological theorists and is entirely unrelated to microplastics or human health.
HAPPENEDIt is hard to believe it now, but there was a time, not that long ago, when the world was still a foregone conclusion-at least for some.This was a time when some philosophers could still dwell on the certainty that, as Husserl (1970, 142) once wrote, "the world is pregiven to us" as an "ontic certainty."The world was so unmistakably there, so evidently pre sent, that it did not compel much thought.So much so that Wittgenstein (1972, 85) pondered why it was perfectly normal for his contemporaries to ask how long a house had been in its place, but the same question was rarely ever asked about a mountain-because mountains, like the world itself, seemed to belong to that realm of certainties that are evident to the point of invisibility.Looking at the conversations that dominated Euro-American academia back then, one feels a distinctive sense of culmination, a sense of being on the verge of a new time.Some even proposed to give this new time a name.Terms such as "second modernity," "reflexive modernity," "high modernity," or even "postmodernity" were proposed to christen it.Amid the intense debates about its nomenclature and chronology-some located it around the post-World War II order, others around the 1960s, and still others around the 1970s-there was an ele ment that was shared by virtually all the participants in these discussions.This was the tacit, but firm, belief
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