Byron Williston

• Wilfrid Laurier University

Dwelling in the Age of Climate Change: The Ethics of Adaptation, Elaine Kelly (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 224 pp., cloth $110, paperback $29.95. - Volume 34 Issue 2 - Byron Williston

Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene CLIVE HAMILTON Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017, xiv + 185 pp. (paperback) - BYRON WILLISTON

The Good Anthropocene is a position taken up by a diverse collection of writers, social scientists, and philosophers. Their claim is that the Anthropocene should be embraced as a more or less positive development in the history of our species. This paper pushes back against the narrative of the Good Anthropocene. But rather than confront its advoca...

This article examines some of the major theoretical components of climate change ethics. These include: the nature of challenge posed to human societies by climate change as well as the phenomenon of climate change denial; the central question of justice in efforts to grapple with climate change, especially the distribution of clean up costs; the c...

The Anthropocene, as we encounter it now, is the age in which we can no longer avoid postnaturalism, that is, a view of the 'environment' as largely 'built.' This means that we exist in a highly technologically mediated relationship to the rest of the earth system. But because the Anthropocene has barely emerged this time is best thought of as a tr...

Alienation and Nature in Environmental Philosophy HAILWOOD SIMON Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015; ix + 266 pp. $113.95 (hardback) - BYRON WILLISTON

In the face of increasingly dire warnings about the severity of climate change, how can we rationally hope for a solution to the problem? In this paper I argue that although such hope is warranted, it must take the form of what Jonathan Lear calls ‘radical hope.’ That is, given that the cultural and social changes in store for humanity in the wake...

In a recent letter to Canada's national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, British columnist and climate change gadfly George Monbiot pleaded with Canada to clean up its greenhouse gas emissions act. The letter appeared just a week before the Copenhagen climate conference. In it, Monbiot alleged that Canada's newly acquired status as oil superpower thr...

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Some philosophers – notably Bernard Williams, Martha Nussbaum and Ruth Barcan Marcus – argue that agents in moral dilemmas are blameworthy whatever they do. I begin by uncovering the connection these philosophers are presupposing between the agent’s judgement of wrongdoing and her tendency to self-blame. Next, I argue that while dilemmatic choosers...

For Descartes, the passions are the key to the good life. But he is also way of the extent to which they may lead us astray. As I argue, there is reason to be skeptical that Descartes himself provides a satisfying resolution of this tension in the Passions of the Soul. The problem concerns our ability to interpret and work through intra-subjective...

Humanism with a Human Face: Intimacy and the EnlightenmentRadestHoward B.Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996, xi + 212 pp., $59.95 - Volume 37 Issue 4 - Byron Williston

Journal of the History of Ideas 58.3 (1997) 429-444 One of philosophy's most enduring questions is inspired by Plato's Euthyphro: do we love something because it is lovable, or is it lovable because we love it? Perhaps nowhere is this problem more intractable than in Descartes's theory of love. In his view love is the concrete attempt on the part o...

Etude de la theorie de l'amour developpee par Descartes dans le sens de la recherche d'une reciprocite ethique entre les hommes, satisfaisant le besoin de decouvrir et de creer des valeurs. Rejetant l'interpretation d'I. Singer fondee sur la distinction hermeneutique entre l'estimation et le don, l'A. montre que la conception cartesienne de l'amour...