Sydney Environment Institute

Unbecoming Animal? Agency / Responsibility / Survival

Philosophy@UWS of the University of Western Sydney in collaboration with the State Library of NSW, ABC Radio National and Fordham University Press invite you to this year’s Thinking Out Loud: The Sydney Lectures in Philosophy and Society.

Climate change brings new significance to traditional philosophical questions around reason, agency, responsibility, community and our place in nature. The focus is shifting away from promoting the good life and towards the survival of the species. Leading environmental philosopher David Wood tackles the Anthropocene in his Sydney Lectures.

Unbecoming Animal? Agency / Responsibility / Survival

The third lecture follows up the problem (from Lecture I) of who ‘we’ are in respect of solidarity with other humans, and responsibility for the non-human stakeholders with which we share a planet. It also addresses a range of questions centred around political agency raised by the failures of the Kyoto process. Is a democracy-to-come the problem or the solution? And could human exceptionalism be reborn as hyperbolic responsibility rather than privilege?

David Wood is W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. His books includes Time after Time (2007); The Step Back: Ethics and Politics After Deconstruction(2005); Thinking After Heidegger (2002);The Deconstruction of Time (2001), and Philosophy at the Limit (1990).

$10 per lecture or $25 whole series
bookings essential