Environmental ethics asks what, if anything, we owe to what is not us. The course treats that as a live philosophical question rather than a settled position to be catalogued, and it does not assume in advance that “nature” is the concept that will answer it.
Connection to My Research
The course draws directly on my published work. Adorno on the Possibility of Nature (Environmental Philosophy, 2023) argues for a conception of nature that refuses both its domination and its romanticization, locating the normative stance instead in missed possibilities of past human engagement with non-human nature. My review essay on Steven Vogel's Thinking like a Mall takes up the opposite challenge — that environmental philosophy should abandon nature as its foundation altogether — and presses on what remains once it does.
Related conference work includes “Arendt and Leopold on History and Nature,” “Critical Theory and Environmental Limits: Apocalypse, Rage, and the Spell,” and “The Commodity Form and the Empty Space of Nature.”