Hermeneutics of Human-Animal Relations in the Wake of Rewilding

Mateusz Tokarski, PhD., is currently an independent researched and writer. He holds a BA in Film and Theater Studies from London Metropolitan University, an MA in Cognitive Semiotics from Aarhus University and a PhD in Philosophy from Radboud University Nijmegen. His main research interests center around human-animal relations, the role of wildness in modern culture, and the processes of meaning-making approached from both cognitive-scientific and hermeneutic perspectives. In addition, he is interested in the role that arts can play in developing environmental awareness and in restructuring human relationship with the non-human world – a topic he engages with through his own experiments with storytelling. He has published articles dealing with rewilding, wildlife conflicts, and reconnecting to nature. Recently, he has completed his PhD during which he carried out a series of hermeneutic studies of the ways people make sense of discomforting encounters with wildlife.

• Chapter 1. Introduction: the Return of Wildlife.- Chapter 2. Ecological Discomforts in Environmental Thought.- Chapter 3. Interests, Costs, Benefits, and the Social Complexity of Discomforts.- Chapter 4. Wildness and the Preconditions for Meaningfulness of Nature.- Chapter 5. Discomforting Encounters with Nature as Moral Experiences.- Chapter 6. Individual Sacrifices and the Flourishing of Ecosystems.- Chapter 7. Towards a Wilder Community.- Chapter 8. Practicing Coexistence.- Chapter 9. Summary and General Conclusions.