Iberian Scholasticism and Imperial World-Ecology

Orlando Bentancor, Associate Professor of Spanish and Latin American Cultures, Bernard College.

Paper presented to the Third annual conference of the World-Ecology Research Network 20-21 July, 2017 Binghamton University, Binghamton, New York

Orlando Bentancor connects medieval Christian thought (Scholasticism) with the environmental and social impacts of Spanish/Portuguese empires. He examines how theology, natural law (per Thomas Aquinas, later Enlightenment liberalism), and European thirst for expansionist conquest and plunder and will to dominate all life shaped extractivist instrumentalism as a material force within the emerging capitalist world-ecology.