BIO

Born in Oxford, England, 1946

Higher Education

* Foundation Year, Keele University, 1964-65

* BA (First Class Hons) in Philosophy, University of Manchester, 1965-68

* Doctoral research, New College, Oxford, 1968-71

* Bourses des Hautes Etudes, Paris, 1974

* PhD (Philosophy), University of Warwick, 1985

Appointments

* Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Warwick (1971-88)

* Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Warwick (1988-92)

* Chairman, Department of Philosophy, University of Warwick (August 1992-4)

* Director, Centre for Research in Philosophy and Literature, Warwick (1991-4)

* General Editor, Warwick Studies in Philosophy and Literature [Routledge],

for the Centre for Research in Philosophy and Literature at Warwick (1987-1990)

* Programme Director, Centre for Research in Philosophy and Literature, University of Warwick (1987-89)

* Professor of Philosophy, University of Warwick (1992-4)

* Professor of Philosophy, Vanderbilt University (1994-)

* Chair, Department of Philosophy, Department of Philosophy, 1995-8

* Co-Director, Fellows Program on Constructions, Destructions and Deconstructions of Nature, Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities 1999-2000

* Centennial Professor of Philosophy, Vanderbilt University (2007-2010)

* Joe B. Wyatt Distinguished University Professor 2008

* Professor of European Studies (Vanderbilt) 2008-

* Co-director, CSRC research group: Ecology and Spirituality in America: Possibilities of Cultural Transformation [2005-8]

* Professor of Art (Vanderbilt) 2009-

* Distinguished International Fellow of the London Graduate School, 2010-

* W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy, Vanderbilt University (2010 - )

Visiting Positions

* Visiting Fellow, Yale University, Fall 1978

* Research Associate, SUNY at Stony Brook, Fall 1978 / Spring 1979

* Visiting Fellow, UC Berkeley, Spring/Summer 1979

* Visiting Professor, Duquesne University, Summer 1984

* Visiting Professor, De Paul University, April 1990

* Visiting Professor, University of Turin, March 1994

* Honorary Visiting Professor, Humanities Research Program,

University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, October-November 2000

My current research is centered on the ways in which climate change gives new significance and urgency to traditional ethical, political and metaphysical issues. If ‘we cannot go on like this', revolution is no longer just a matter of social justice, but of ecological necessity. Truth is no longer a postmodern plaything but a matter of life and death. If we have entered a new geological age – the Anthropocene – with the future of the planet on our backs, what is it now to be human? I am completing books on Reinhabiting the Earth, and Deep Time, (both with Fordham University Press) the latter an expansion of the Thinking Out Loud lectures in Sydney - April/May 2015. I am also working on a longer term writing project Things at the Edge of the World, elaborating the ways in which various Things are not merely part of the furniture of the world, but open up worlds of their own., a fractal ontology. After Giving Voice to Other Beings (2009), I co-organized a conference on EcoDeconstruction: Derrida and Environmental Ethics (Spring 2015) which will result in an edited volume, also with Fordham. On the teaching front my persistent effort is to ‘rewrite Heidegger’s Being and Time’ in the light of the shifts in Heidegger’s own thinking, the new materialism, and other contemporary concerns such as sexual difference, non-human animals, and the earth. I run the Thinking Out of the (Lunch)Box series of lunchtime talks at the Nashville Downtown Public Library.