Analysis of the Influence of Western Philosophy on the Development of Chinese Environmental Philosophy Theory and Its Future Direction

Western environmental philosophy was born out of the environmental movement that emerged in the second half of the 20th century, and it is fundamentally practical in orientation. However, over the past 50 years, the study of environmental philosophy has become increasingly abstract and theoretical and seems to have drifted away from the practice of environmental protection. At the beginning of the 21st century, Western environmental philosophy began to take a policy turn, with an increasing number of philosophers actively participating in national and international environmental policy discussions. This turn is the latest development in environmental pragmatism. However, the philosophy embodied in this turn is still weak and lacks sufficiently strong theoretical roots. An environmental philosophy that truly achieves a policy turn, i.e., one that can exert a truly significant influence in environmental policy making, must be based on a unified and robust theoretical paradigm. This paper takes the goals and tasks of environmental philosophy research as an entry point, analyzes the deviation of the development of environmental philosophy in China to the problem of the intrinsic value argument, and explores the new direction of environmental philosophy research by focusing on the central argument of environmental pragmatism. In order to deeply explore this issue, this paper takes the Marxist concept of development as the theoretical guide and mainly adopts the methods of inductive research, comparative research, and theory to practice. This paper summarizes the foundation of contemporary environmental philosophy into four basic questions of center, value, ethics, and survival and seeks answers to these questions in philosophical thought. To construct the basic framework of modern Chinese environmental philosophy, through the comparative study of environmental ethics in different periods, this paper explores the relationship between environmental ethics in the perspective of Marxist concept of development, so as to further clarify the development direction of environmental ethics in China in the future.