Newsletter: March 2024 [Note: I post my monthly newsletters to the blog with a one month delay. If you’d like to get them when they’re first shared, join my mailing list.] Hello everyone, and happy March! I’m making the move today from my temporary home in Ucluelet to my longer-term home in Vancouver. I spent the last two months in a friend’s house on the wild west coast of Vancouver Island, which was a real treat in so many ways. But now it’s time to get back to city life. We’ve now passed the midway point in my winter online course, Thinking about the End: Philosophy and Death. In the la ..read more

Starting Points Animal Ethics and Environmental Ethics: What's the Difference? People who care about animals tend to care about the environment and vice versa. On a philosophical level, you can see how both forms of care are ways of making non-human beings matter. Advocates of animal ethics and of environmental ethics both stand against an anthropocentric ethics, according to which ethics is primarily or exclusively of the humans, by the humans, and for the humans. This way of framing the matter makes animal ethics and environmental ethics natural allies. But matters aren’t so simple. As th ..read more

Newsletter: February 2024 [Note: I post my monthly newsletters to the blog with a one month delay. If you’d like to get them when they’re first shared, join my mailing list.] Hello everyone and welcome to February 2024—3.57% longer than your standard February! (This is a leap year, in case that reference confused you.) I’m writing to you in rainy Ucluelet, British Columbia, which averages half a metre of rain in January. Nearly half that amount has fallen in the past week. I’m living a short walk from the roiling Pacific Ocean and surrounded by thick rainforest and feeling very much in my ..read more

Reflections Saints and Prophets After some time of studying Wittgenstein and Heidegger, the two oddly started to merge. They’re so obviously different in so many ways and yet it became increasingly hard for me to say what that difference was. One rough contrast that came to me was to say that Heidegger aspires to be a prophet and Wittgenstein aspires to be a saint. Maybe more a difference of style than of substance—although especially with these two thinkers, style and substance are hard to disentangle—but I’ve come to find the saint/prophet contrast more generally helpful. In this blog post ..read more

Newsletter: January 2024 [Note: I post my monthly newsletters to the blog with a one month delay. If you’d like to get them when they’re first shared, join my mailing list.] Hello everyone, and happy new year! I hope 2024 is off to a good start for all of you. The start of 2024 finds me in Ucluelet, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, and a ten-minute walk from the roaring Pacific Ocean. I’m spending the first two months of the year in this magical location, subletting from a friend of mine who’s leading kayak tours in Antarctica (poor thing). I love the wild west coast of Vancouver Isl ..read more

Newsletter: December 2023 [Note: I post my monthly newsletters to the blog with a one month delay. If you’d like to get them when they’re first shared, join my mailing list.] Hello everyone.   It’s December already! 2023 is drawing to a close! How did that happen and why did nobody warn me?   Among the things that are drawing to a close is my online course on environmental philosophy. After encounters with Ramachandra Guha’s environmentalism of the poor and Murray Bookchin’s social ecology in the last couple weeks, we’ll wrap things up with a look at the intractable problem of cl ..read more

Reflections On "Bourgeois" Philosophy A lot of the work I’ve done in academic philosophy (such as it is) has straddled the boundary of so-called “analytic” and so-called “continental” philosophy. I like the precision and clarity of analytic philosophy but so much of the time it feels unimaginative and unadventurous. (The expectation of precision and clarity might be part of what nudges people in the direction of the unimaginative and unadventurous.) Especially on matters of value, it often seems settled from the outset that our minds or our hearts aren’t actually supposed to be changed in th ..read more

Newsletter: November 2023 [Note: I post my monthly newsletters to the blog with a one month delay. If you’d like to get them when they’re first shared, join my mailing list.] Hello everyone, and welcome to November. I trust you all had a satisfyingly spooky Halloween. I spent Halloween evening communing with the ghost of ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood, who’s the subject of the fourth week of this autumn’s online course, The World Around Us: Philosophy and the Environment. For Plumwood, ethical universalism and deep ecology are the real horrors and she offers an ethics of care as an a ..read more

[Starting Points] What Is Existentialism? Part Four: "Broad Church" Existentialism Last May, I thought I’d write a post giving readers a general introduction to existentialism. That proved to be too much for a single post so I restricted myself to existentialism proper, the French existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Existentialism “proper” because Sartre and Beauvoir were the only thinkers to style themselves self-consciously as existentialists (and only for a time). But this term “existentialism” has taken on a life of its own and has found application in a much wider ..read more

Newsletter: October 2023 [Note: I post my monthly newsletters to the blog with a one month delay. If you’d like to get them when they’re first shared, join my mailing list.] Hello everyone, and welcome to October. Autumn is underway and that means it’s time for some online philosophy classes. This coming week we’re holding introductory meetings for my course on environmental philosophy, The World Around: Philosophy and the Environment. The Tuesday and Wednesday sessions are fully booked but there’s still space in the Thursday group. And I can put your name on a waitlist for the other tw ..read more