Speaker: Adam Briggle, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy and Religion, University of North Texas
Sustainability raises a host of philosophical questions about ethics and values, knowledge and power, and more. And yet philosophy is not part of the predominant approaches to and discourses around sustainability. This is due to dysfunctions in society and in philosophy. In this talk, I’ll focus on the latter, by arguing that philosophers have fallen victim to disciplinary capture, which consigns them to irrelevance or, at best, very indirect impacts. Public philosophy, in various ways, seeks to change this situation, and it is having a renaissance. I’ll focus on field philosophy, which is a species of public philosophy that is both a collaborative practice of engaged scholarship and a theory of knowledge that contrasts with the disciplinary model of knowledge production.
Adam Briggle is an Associate Professor and the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of North Texas. He is the author of A Field Philosopher’s Guide to Fracking (2015), Socrates Tenured: The Institutions of 21st Century Philosophy (co-authored with Robert Frodeman, 2016), and Thinking through Climate Change: A Philosophy of Energy in the Anthropocene (2021). He currently serves on the Sustainability Framework Advisory Committee for the City of Denton, TX, which is drafting a local climate action plan. He is also involved in social and political movements for transgender rights in Texas.
