Public Lecture by David Wood

W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy and Professor of European Studies
Vanderbilt University

Tuesday, 17 February, 4:00-5:30pm
Jaqua Auditorium

Nietzsche worried about the terrible burden of human history. By analogy, what would constitute an adequate response to our increasingly cosmic

grasp of our terrestrial situation? We have come to see ourselves as a product of

extraordinary natural forces, operating at many levels, over countless millennia, continuous and yet not quite continuous with the rest of life. We have constructed stories about these events, even as the timescales involved boggle the imagination. And we have invented new paradigms to understand the times we live in, ones that launch us into the geological, and its particular passions. Humans have long felt a sense of infinite connectedness and awe on looking up at the stars. Such passions animate any geologically alive being. I discuss the significance of four such responses: wonder, curiosity, delight and angst.

David Wood’s 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 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? Wood is completing books on Reinhabiting the Earth, and Deep Time (both with Fordham University Press), the latter an expansion of the Thinking Out Loud lectures he is giving in Sydney in April/May 2015. He is 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), he is organizing a conference on EcoDeconstruction: Derrida and Environmental Ethics (Spring 2015) which will result in an edited volume, also with Fordham. On the teaching front, his 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. He is also trying to address a number of these same issues as an earth/conceptual artist in his Heliotrope, Chronopod, and Wordscape projects, the IntraTerrestrials: Landing Sites series and the development of Yellow Bird Art Farm. Reflection on how Art is more than a thing of the past, but still helps us think, and rethink, is an ongoing focus. He runs Thinking Out of the (lunch) Box, a series of public talks/conversations at the Nashville Downtown Public Library.

Sponsored by the Climate Change Research Group and the Department of Philosophy