Birth: October 21, 1947
I'm a subjectivist about morality..
Most of what we think of as distinctively human has occurred in the last 10,000 years in the Holocene - a period in which the Earth was abnormally qu….
Even those who specialize in the history of philosophy often ignore the political and cultural context, and the natural world in which their philosop….
The very essence of civilized culture is that we deliberately institute, in advance of the happening of various contingencies and emergencies of life….
Philosophy isn't reading Emmanuel Kant. Philosophy is about thinking hard about what the right thing to do is in a situation and approaching that kin….
A common rhetorical strategy of politicians and others is to frame their opponents' views in the worst possible light, tacitly suggesting that all ve….
Moral revolutions are typically seen retrospectively. Prospectively, the revolutionaries tend to look like crazy people, and sometimes they are..
Philosophers (and probably most intellectuals) are more interested in pursuing what they see as the logical implications of their theories than they ….
I see a lot of individual action when it comes to environmental questions really as a form of politics as a way of communicating with political leade….
One of the real dangers of our time is people's indifference to history..
We think of history as another specialization, like philosophy of language, rather than as something that informs everything we do and think..
I became religious and at 14 went to a boarding school 500 miles from home to begin theological studies. By the time I started university, politics h….
When it comes to climate change it's all the usual barriers: greed, mendacity, ignorance, short-sightedness and so on, manifest in the extreme power ….
Philosophy is not a body of knowledge to impart to someone, that's why reading philosophy books isn't always the best way of learning philosophy. Phi….
[This approach] displays the characteristic philosophical lust to vanquish the skeptic by arguing him out of his skepticism, without appeal to moral ….
Sometimes I say philosophers should be at the table because they're the only people who know that they're not going to walk away with big money to su….
None of us are rational economic men as we're supposed to be portrayed in economic theory where mixes of passions, of desires, of moral principles, o….
People will suffer and so will nature, but life is likely to go on with a great deal of loss and mourning. Human adaptability and resilience will sti….
We know the "great men" and a handful of heavily cited papers in our specialization. When there is a historical frame around a paper it's often a car….
Our traditional systems of decision-making are just not up to preventing changes in fundamental earth systems that are driven by a constant barrage o….
It's true that climate change is an unprecedented problem so it's not surprising that it's so difficult to address..