In the two years I’ve been writing this column, I’ve tried to minimize the chances that it might come off as just a repository for spewed sermons, and tried to focus more on the reporting responsibilities associated with editorial work. However, this is my last column in this wonderful paper, and ...
I watched a video recently of a trio of prominent philosophers discussing what’s been termed as the “linguistic turn” in contemporary philosophy. In a nutshell, the linguistic turn marked a movement, beginning with Nineteenth-Century German philosopher Gottlob Frege and culminating in the work ...
This past Sunday, a New York Times opinion piece entitled “Global Warming? Not Always” made the claim that “the scientific evidence does not support an argument that human-induced climate change has played any appreciable role in the current California drought.” To support his argument, NOAA ...
The discipline of political science has come quite a long way since Aristotle’s Politics, arguably the classic work in the study of politics, which asked and answered questions about our nature as political animals. Whereas Aristotle’s methods in that book were primarily observational and logical, ...
Last Thursday I was fortunate enough to catch the screening of Pandora’s Promise in Dana Auditorium and the star-studded panel discussion that followed. The film offered an engaging narrative that provides an argument for nuclear energy that I’m sure supporters of the technology have been waiting ...
Akrasia is the ancient Greek word for “weakness of will,” or, in other words, acting against one’s better judgment. This past week makes me think that the U.S. might have itself a bad case of the stuff when it comes to climate questions. As Greenwire and The New York Times report, the EPA lowered ...
We know that preservation of the South American rain forests is a necessary step in ensuring our future a stable climate. Why, then, is illegal logging in the Amazon still so prevalent? Two weeks ago, the New York Times published a story explaining a recent chapter of Peru’s struggle to combat the ...
The U.S. Supreme Court has a number of high-profile environmental cases on deck for this term. As Greenwire reports, the Court can choose to hear cases that concern challenges from independent parties and 17 states calling for a broad review of the Environmental Protection Agengy’s (EPA) greenhouse ...
As someone whose academic interests lie primarily in the humanities and social sciences, I would hardly identify as someone who “does science.” However, I am also someone interested in the environment, specifically the ways our ideas about our environment fit in with the ideas we have about pretty ...
On Aug. 28, each member of the Middlebury community hoping for a statement from the College concerning the divestment of our endowment from fossil fuel companies received what they had desired. However, the news contained in the email sent out by President of the College Ronald D. Liebowitz wasn’t ...