Director
Rock Ethics Institute
Associate Professor
Department of Philosophy
Penn State University

“Time to Stop Dreaming About the End of the World”
FRIDAY, APRIL 7 • 2:45-4:00p

Ted Toadvine specializes in contemporary continental philosophy, especially phenomenology and recent French thought, and the philosophy of nature and environment. In particular, he has contributed to the development of “ecophenomenology,” an experience-based approach to environmental issues. He has also pursued scholarly and pedagogical collaborations with biologists, artists, architects, and literary scholars around the themes of climate ethics, food sovereignty, environmental justice, restoration ecology, biodiversity conservation, and environmental art and design. Toadvine’s current research addresses the philosophical and ethical significance of deep time, the eschatological imaginary of environmentalism, the relation between geomateriality and memory, and biodiacritics.

He is coauthor of Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature (with Anthony Steinbock, Northwestern Univ. Press, 2009) and editor or translator of six books, including The Merleau-Ponty Reader (with Leonard Lawlor, Northwestern, 2007), and Nature’s Edge: Boundary Explorations in Ecological Theory and Practice (with Charles S. Brown, SUNY, 2007). Noteworthy book chapters include  “Biodiversity and the Diacritics of Life” (Fordham Univ. Press, 2015) and “Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Lifeworldly Naturalism” (Springer, 2012). Toadvine is currently completing a monograph, The End of All Things: Eschatology and the Elements, as well as co-editing two volumes: Climate Change and the Task of Thinking (with Timothy Christion Myers) and Animality and Sovereignty: Reading Derrida’s Final Seminars (with David Alexander Craig).

He is also editor of the 2013 issue of Chiasmi International on the theme “Existence, Diacritics, Animality,” and guest-edited the 2012 special 50th anniversary issue of The Southern Journal of Philosophy on the theme “Continental Philosophy: What and Where Will It Be?” Toadvine is also a member of the Board of Directors of the International Association for Environmental Philosophy, and serves on a number of editorial and advisory boards, including those for Environmental Ethics, Environmental Humanities, and PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature.

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